Liza Colón-Zayas
Liza Colón-Zayas is an actor, born 1972.
For two decades her credits read like a catalogue of the small parts New York films need: Grumpy Teacher, Judge Angel Rodriguez, 1st Ticket Agent, Mother of Six. She is a playwright as well as an actor, and that is the part of the record which explains why the small parts were never dead weight.
Some of them stick. Waleska Martinez in United 93 is a few minutes inside an ensemble where nobody gets an arc, and she is still recognisably a person in it. Rita Ortiz in In Treatment gave her longer to work with. Then there were the reliable genre and studio jobs: Dawn in The Purge: Election Year, Robin in Collateral Beauty, an officer in Cat Person, Janet in IF.
The Bear changed the scale of everything. Tina Marrero starts as resistance to a new regime in a failing kitchen and is gradually opened out into the show's most quietly satisfying strand, and Colón-Zayas plays her with a flat refusal to perform emotion, which makes the rare moments she lets something through hit twice as hard. She won the Primetime Emmy for supporting actress in a comedy in 2024, the first Latina to win in that category.
By any measure that is a late arrival, and one of the more clearly deserved ones. She also has a part in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which is a strange sentence to write about an actor who spent twenty years playing ticket agents.
Movies (13)
TV (6)
Where to start with Liza Colón-Zayas
There is no point pretending the answer is anything other than The Bear. Tina builds slowly across the series, so the first few episodes will not tell you much; stay until the kitchen starts to change and watch what she does with a character the show initially seems to be using as an obstacle.
Beyond that, United 93 is the one to see next. It is a hard sit for obvious reasons, but her handful of minutes show the same instinct at work: no performance of feeling, just a person.
In Treatment holds her most sustained pre-Bear material, The Purge: Election Year and Collateral Beauty are the honest studio jobs, and IF is the one your children may have seen. Cat Person is worth a look for how much she gets out of a single scene as a police officer.