Laia Costa
Laia Costa is an actor, born 1985.
Costa was working in Catalan and Spanish television, on series like Polseres vermelles and Cites, when a German production handed her the kind of part that does not usually come to a jobbing TV actor. Victoria, released in 2015, is a feature shot in a single unbroken take across one night in Berlin, and the entire construction rests on the title character holding together in real time, with no cuts to hide behind and no second attempt at a line.
It changed what she was offered, though not in the direction you would expect. Rather than scale, she went to intimacy: a run of English-language relationship films, Newness, Duck Butter, Only You, the multi-strand Life Itself, and the very unpleasant Piercing. In all of them she plays attraction as a decision rather than a mood, and she is notably comfortable being the less likeable person in a scene.
The accolades came from the Spanish-language work. She has a Goya Award for Best Actress, a German Film Award and two Platino Awards, along with British Academy Film Award and European Film Award nominations. The features that won her the Goya and the second Platino are not among the credits listed here, which is worth saying plainly rather than pretending this list is the whole career.
Lately she has taken bigger machinery: Moghedien in The Wheel of Time, and a 2026 Mummy picture.
Movies (10)
TV (7)
Where to start with Laia Costa
Everything starts with Victoria, and not because of the technical stunt. What matters is what the unbroken take does to her performance, which has to build fatigue, nerve and bad judgement in the exact order a normal shoot would let an actor fake.
After that, Only You is the best of the English-language romances and the one that hurts, Newness is the coldest, and Duck Butter is the strangest experiment of the three. Piercing is a hard turn into stylised horror and shows how far from naturalism she can go. For the Spanish work, Palm Trees in the Snow is the big-canvas melodrama and Polseres vermelles is where a lot of Spanish viewers met her. The Wheel of Time is her most-watched credit now, though not the one that will convince you.