I first meet Laysla De Oliveira for our shoot day at a Hollywood motel. She arrives tall and affable, hugs for all. She recently got her hair chopped off, her Posh Spice phase. She jokes she’ll wear all purple for her wedding party, Beckham-style, coming up this December in Palm Springs. She met her husband, Jonathan Keltz, “at the clurb” in her home city, Toronto, and she describes him as the first actor she ever met — when he revealed his Hollywood 323 area code, she was giddy.
Ten years later, De Oliveira has become an established Hollywood actor herself. In 2019, she played one of the protagonists in the horror movie “In the Tall Grass,” based on the novella Stephen King wrote with his son Joe Hill, and between 2020 and 2022, she was the demonic Dodge in the supernatural series “Locke & Key.” De Oliveira felt a shift with “Special Ops: Lioness” (streaming on Paramount+), in which she plays Cruz, a Marine recruited by the CIA to be an undercover agent. Created by Taylor Sheridan, the series has just wrapped up its second season and features an impressive cast, including Zoe Saldaña, Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman. Cruz is a lonely character who has endured severe physical and emotional abuse. In De Oliveira’s performance of Cruz, she effortlessly moves between the soft and hard, between deep, layered silences and the unleashing of rough, jagged, loose dialogue.
At the motel, in between shots, De Oliveira approaches me and slips fragments of her own life story. She’s excited that we share a Brazilian background, that she can speak in Portuguese with me, that we both grew up moving back and forth. She tells me how her mother immigrated to Canada as a cleaning lady and built their life with very little, how she lived in Brazil when she was 10, how embraced she was by the kids there, and how bullied she was by the kids upon her return north. “Character growth!” she laughs. This experience of growing up between languages and cultures has, in her words, given her more “access” to understanding character and what it means to be human.
Over peppermint tea at the Soho Holloway, De Oliveira reflects on herself as a kind of character when she refers to herself in the third person. “Cruz has grown this year, and I feel Laysla as an artist has grown this year,” she says. She describes having to learn to almost protect herself from Cruz, a character that was “so dark” that it “took a really long time to shed.” It’s like De Oliveira kept living her character off-screen: “Your brain knows that it’s done, but your body doesn’t.”
Sheridan had initially told De Oliveira that Cruz wouldn’t be written into the next season due to the way the storyline was naturally developing, which led to a heartfelt goodbye. “He totally changed my whole life, he opened this door for me,” De Oliveira says, the tears building in her eyes. “I get emotional because it’s like I’ve been waiting for that for so long, you know?”
As Sheridan was writing the script, Cruz found her way through, and he ended up calling De Oliveira back. As chaotic as that flip-flopping sounds, De Oliveira says she’s since found “more maturity, calm and peace.” She understands the balance of pulling from your life for a character, without losing sight of yourself. She understands that to step into another life, you first need to articulate your own.
Elisa Wouk Almino: You’ve been in Los Angeles for 11 years already?
Laysla De Oliveira: Almost, yeah. I had to wait to get my work visa to be able to fully come here. The other day I was just thinking about this conversation that we were going to have about the industry and Hollywood, and it’s so interesting, because Canada’s so close, but it also feels so far away. You have to jump so many hoops to be able to be here and work here. I remember when I got my visa, I was sobbing. I was so happy, because I felt like, finally, I was going to be able to pursue my dreams. A decade ago, there weren’t that many streaming platforms, so really the opportunities were here. I see a big shift now when I’ve been sent back home to work, and they hire so many locals, but at the time, it wasn’t like that. And truthfully, still, if you really want to get those major roles, you have to come to the epicenter of the whole place, which is here.
I remember getting here, and I was by myself because Jonathan, my husband, was back home shooting, and I walked down Sunset [Boulevard] and looked at every single palm tree and was just elated, and oftentimes when I get frustrated — just regular frustrations of sometimes you want to be further than you are — I try to connect to that feeling, to that girl who is happy just walking down Sunset and looking at palm trees.
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EWA: How did you envision Hollywood before moving out here? Did moving here match that vision?
LDO: When you get here, it’s a different story. You have a bit of a reality crash. I remember months and months of auditioning and not booking anything. It starts to weigh on you. Also, if you don’t have the right group of friends, it also starts to weigh on you. People come here to make a name for themselves, and as magical as that can be, there’s also a dark side to it — some people will stop at nothing to get what they want. You have to have a really great read on people, and you also have to find ways to really ground yourself. It’s here that I found yoga and meditation and all those things that I think help with work-life balance and make L.A. beautiful. It’s important to find whatever works for you to raise your vibration. Because it’s not just about being talented or maybe being lucky, it’s about having your energy in a good place so you can do what you feel you were meant to do in your heart and hopefully inspire others along the process.
EWA: In talking with Paul Yem about the concept behind the photo shoot we did with you, we were talking about what Old Hollywood looked like versus Hollywood now. There’s this conversation happening that Hollywood isn’t as original as it once was — a kind of flattening of stories and aesthetics. I’m curious if you agree with that.
LDO: The most original stories come from an original experience, because that’s all we have. We have ourselves and our own experience. So when you can take something that’s actually happened to them and have that be the seed of a story and embellish on that, I think people create really interesting projects. A great example is “My Old Ass” by Megan Park in theaters. She’s a fellow Canadian, and it’s an homage to her life, it’s not word-for-word exactly what happened to her. It’s beautiful and unique and raw. When I was watching, I had this nostalgic feeling. Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic. I like to see the glass half full. I think that, yes, a lot of things have been diluted, and there’s so much stuff out there for us to consume. But I do think there are some little diamonds around. I think the future is colorful, too. I see it in my experiences. Like “Lioness” this year has three Latin leads, which is incredible. I love that we can all work together and celebrate each other. I haven’t had that experience before.
EWA: I was reading some of your past interviews, and I loved this anecdote that you brought up of watching Brazilian novelas with your family and being drawn to the drama — how you “loved how people felt so deeply.” How did this experience inform your relationship to acting?
The most original stories come from an original experience, because that’s all we have. We have ourselves and our own experience.
LDO: Novelas are my Old Hollywood. I feel very lucky, because that means that I grew up seeing people like me on screen. It doesn’t matter what age you are — even though it might be a little bit of inappropriate content — the whole family is watching together, and growing up, because it was just me and my mom for a good chunk, it was such a beautiful way for us to connect. My mom loves to quote me — when I was little, and the novela would end, I’d be like, Por que uma coisa tão boa tem que acabar? (Why does something so good have to end?)
It’s that universal feeling that everybody shares when they watch something they really like and they’re able to connect with other humans on it. That’s the beautiful thing of acting and creating art: You get to put out feeling for people. And they get to see themselves. They get to contemplate, and they get to connect with others in that journey of experiencing something on a screen.
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EWA: I was so moved that you asked Netflix to dub your parts in “Locke & Key” and “In the Tall Grass.” What was it like to act those parts in Portuguese?
LDO: I loved every single minute of it. I’m so happy they let me do it. I wanted my grandparents and a lot of my family members to hear my own voice. They’re in Minas [Gerais state], in Ipatinga, which is a small town, and my grandma can’t read, so they’re not going to have subtitles on the bottom. I learned a lot. I learned Portuguese along the way, I learned different vocabulary. It was really beautiful to almost act in Portuguese, bring that side out of myself. I really wanted to do that for “Lioness” too, but it was a lot of episodes in a really tough show emotionally, that I didn’t think that I could experience that again.
EWA: I was curious to talk about this with you. I also translate Brazilian poetry. When I write, my language of expression is English, but then you get to tap into this other part of yourself ….
LDO: Oh, wow! And there are words that you can’t use to describe, which drives me crazy sometimes, but is also so beautiful. I was thinking of this the other day, the word carente. There isn’t that word in English at all, and that is a big word that I would use to describe Cruz in “Lioness”: She’s carente. I tried to look it up the other day, and there isn’t [an equivalent]. It’s almost like “needy for love.”
It’s an exercise that I try to do sometimes. If I’m not quite getting something on the page, I try to see if I said it in Portuguese, what would that sound like? It’s a totally different flavor. It’s a new spice that you add.
EWA: Do you remember an example of when you did that?
LDO: It’s more about just understanding human behavior. The bigger your vocabulary is, especially in another language, you can understand people differently sometimes. It gives you more understanding. Because when you approach a character, you never want to judge them. I think knowing another language in another culture gives you more access.
EWA: How did your experience of growing up between two cultures inform the way you approach acting?
LDO: I’m very character-based, if we go off Cruz, who I just played, her grit and her strength absolutely come from me being Brazilian, seeing the fight that my parents went through. When I talk to my parents about them moving to Canada, it feels like I’m hearing the story of a great-great-grandparent, and it’s not, it’s their story. When my mom moved to Canada, she didn’t even know that people spoke English there, so she was starting from ground zero. My father said that all he could afford to eat was an ovo frito, egg on bread, and that would be his one meal a day. You see that, and you go, “Wow, look how far we’ve come as a family unit.” We’re fighters. That aspect I infuse into Cruz. If we want to talk about Dodge from “Locke & Key,” she’s sexy, she’s sensual. She’s not afraid of being bad — and honey, that is Brazil. It’s really fun. I get to look at these characters and be like, “How can I infuse myself into this? How can I infuse my own experiences?”
This is making me think of when I moved out here and I wasn’t booking things right away. I called my manager, I was bawling my eyes out, and [he gave me] the best advice I’ve ever gotten. He was like, “I think you’re just trying to get the part. Don’t try to get the part. Just be yourself, because nobody can be you.” What I started doing is I wouldn’t even read the character description. I would think, “How would I do this? What is it about me that makes me unique, that I can sort of infuse into this?” And then I would go and read the character description to see if I needed to add a layer or two. It really started to work.
EWA: You said that Taylor Sheridan often writes his characters based on the people he casts.
LDO: Which is hilarious, because I feel like I’m so different from Cruz, but he saw it in me. I brought this up recently with him. There’s another actress that he cast on another show of his, and she’s lovely and so different from her character. And I said, “Oh, you’re really good at doing that. You really see the vision.” And he was like, “Oh no, it’s in there.” I’ll give him this: I am feisty, and I have maybe this power and anger in me that I contain a lot. It was a very unique experience to have that opened up. It’s the beautiful thing of being first generation. It’s also the hard thing. All of that lives in my heart, and I was able to explore that with that character. I feel so different from Cruz, but I also feel like I was born to play her. I understand her so deeply, so maybe we explore some similar themes, but just different soul coats?
EWA: I mean, the parts you’ve played are pretty intense.
LDO: And I’m a goofball! It’s starting to get a little bit better now, because now they’ve seen several projects, but when I was newer [and showed up to set], people were like, “This is the girl? This is the girl who’s gonna do all that?” And then something just gets ignited.
EWA: When you moved out here to work in Hollywood, are these the kinds of parts you envisioned playing?
LDO: You know what’s hilarious? The main note I would get was that I was not edgy enough. Not edgy enough. And now, it’s all edge.
Production Rafaela Remy Sanchez
Hair Jerrod Roberts
Makeup Alexa Hernandez
Photo assistants Scott Aguayo, Christopher Mortenson
