Leandro Firmino
Leandro Firmino is an actor, born 1978.
One role defines Leandro Firmino, and it is one of the most frightening performances in modern Brazilian cinema. He was cast as Ze Pequeno, Li'l Ze, the drug lord at the centre of City of God (2002), a film that went on to Academy Award nominations, and he plays the part with a giggling, unbothered ease that is far worse than menace would have been. The character is funny for a while, and that is precisely what makes the rest unbearable.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1978, he was an unknown when the film arrived, and he returned to the subject a decade later in the documentary City of God: 10 Years Later, appearing as himself to talk about what the film did to the people in it.
The work since has been mostly Brazilian television, and it has been steady: Gilmar in Impure, Jose Ferreira in Opposite Lives, parts in Silent Cargo and the 2025 series Anything Goes, plus a role in the Mexican production La Maquina. He voiced Urso in the animated Noah's Ark in 2024. He also played Thiago in Trash and a Goitaca chief in Goitaca, neither of which is among the credits listed here.
He has never escaped Li'l Ze, and very few actors get a first role big enough to be trapped by.
Movies (4)
TV (5)
Where to start with Leandro Firmino
Begin with City of God, obviously, but watch it for what he does with rhythm rather than for the violence. Li'l Ze is playful before he is terrifying, and the playfulness is the point. It is why the performance still gets cited more than twenty years on.
Follow it with City of God: 10 Years Later if the first film hits you hard. The documentary catches up with the cast and complicates the story of what that success actually bought them, and Firmino is one of its most level voices.
After that, the television is where he lives. Impure is the strongest of it, a crime series that lets him play someone with a job rather than a legend. La Máquina is the most internationally visible recent credit, Silent Cargo the pulpier option, Opposite Lives the earliest, and Noah's Ark is the one to put on for children.