Ana Layevska, the Kyiv-born actress Mexico keeps casting as the rich woman you love to resent

Ana Layevska

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	January 10, 1982 Kyiv, Ukraine
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Cantinflas, Casi divas, Tired of Kissing Frogs
Awards	TVyNovelas Award, Best Female Revelation · Premio Palmas de Oro, Female Revelation

When Rodrigo García was casting Santita, Ana Layevska auditioned with a monologue in English and almost no information about the character. The verdict came back with a correction attached. The director, she later told ¡HOLA!, had assumed she was American, and he offered to rewrite Sierra as a Mexican woman now that he knew. She talked him out of it. An actress born in Kyiv, raised in Mexico City and fluent in Russian, Spanish and English had just been mistaken for a gringa, and she wanted to keep the misunderstanding on screen.

The story is funny, and it is also a compressed version of her career. Mexican television has rarely known what to do with her except assign her a social class. Audiences first met her as the guileless sweetheart of a teen telenovela; for most of the past decade, casting directors have sent her the same part in different clothes, the polished, moneyed woman who looks down on everyone in the room. “It happens to me a lot with wealthy, insufferable women,” she told Time Out México this autumn. “When I get a character like that, I try to give her different traits so she isn’t exactly the same woman as always.”

Anna Serhiivna Layevska was the only child of the violinist Serhii Laievskyi and the actress Inna Rastsvetaeva, and her birth on January 10, 1982, in Kyiv, then a Soviet city, put her inside a household where performance was the family trade. She had a violin in her hands at five. The family moved to Moscow in 1987 and, in 1991, the year the Soviet state came apart, to Mexico, where she arrived at nine. The classical training never left her; she still plays violin and piano. The career it pointed toward did. Her first television credit, in Alguna vez tendremos alas in 1997, cast her as a Russian violinist, as though the industry had decided to file her under the one thing it already knew about her.

She trained at the Centro de Educación Artística, the Televisa school that fed the network’s studios, and worked through small parts in Preciosa and Amor gitano and in the music video for the singer David’s “Carolina”. The real entrance came when the producer Pedro Damián cast her as Marina Iturriaga in Primer amor… a mil por hora, a youth telenovela built around Anahí, Kuno Becker and Valentino Lanús. She was eighteen. The role brought her the TVyNovelas Award for best female revelation and the Palmas de Oro in the same category, and a year later she shared the lead of El juego de la vida with Sara Maldonado. Looking back, she says she did not fully grasp, at the time, the size of the success she was living.

The early 2000s also showed that productions outside Mexico could use her. In In the Time of the Butterflies, the Showtime film about the Mirabal sisters, she played Lina Lobatón opposite Salma Hayek and Edward James Olmos. At home she joined Victoria Ruffo’s La madrastra in 2005 as Estrella San Román, and finished third on the celebrity dance contest Bailando por un sueño after viewers’ phone votes saved her three times from judges who did not rate her. In 2006 she took her first starring role, as Ana Escudero in Las dos caras de Ana, a Miami-set Televisa production opposite Rafael Amaya. Lucero Suárez’s Querida enemiga, with Gabriel Soto, followed in 2008, while the films Cansada de besar sapos and Casi divas let her try a lighter register on the big screen.

Then she switched networks, and the casting changed with her. In 2010 she signed an exclusive deal with Telemundo, the American Spanish-language broadcaster, which put her almost at once on the other side of the story: as the antagonist of El fantasma de Elena, then as the villain Débora Noriega in Mi corazón insiste en Lola Volcán. Relaciones peligrosas, Telemundo’s version of the Spanish teen drama Física o química, gave her Patty Milano in 2012, and Dama y obrero handed her the lead again in 2013, as Ignacia opposite José Luis Reséndez. In 2014 she played the actress Miroslava Stern in Cantinflas, the biopic of Mario Moreno. When she returned to Televisa in 2016, it was once more as the antagonist, Camila Borges in Sin rastro de ti, opposite Adriana Louvier.

Here the career shows its seam. The Telemundo villains built a commercial identity that the following decade kept renewing: the rich woman, the rival, the mother who cares how things look. That lane is narrower than what she has shown she can do, and she has stopped pretending otherwise. “There is a lot of prejudice in casting,” she said in the same Time Out conversation, explaining that one well-played type brings offers for more of it, and that an actress either repeats the archetype or finds a way to change it from inside. Speaking to ¡HOLA! in April, she said she wants more drama and fewer parts of the “rich, nasty lady” kind, and more complex, more real women in their place. The awkward part for that argument is that the snob she played best became her most loved work.

That snob is Silvia Espinosa de los Monteros, of The War Next-Door, the Mexican comedy Netflix released in 2021 about a working-class family that lands in an exclusive residential enclave and the neighbours who cannot stand them. Layevska played the neighbour. “Silvia is such a histrionic, funny and exaggerated woman,” she told La Razón in 2022. “She has so many things that seem so negative, but she is adorable.” Viewers wrote to tell her the show had carried them through Covid quarantines, which she called one of the most remarkable things her work has achieved. The second season stripped Silvia of her money and moved her family into the working-class barrio of their rivals, the López, a reversal that turned the type inside out. It is roughly what she says she tries to do every time she is handed another wealthy woman.

Streaming has kept her steadily employed since. She appeared in La muchacha que limpia and Código implacable, and played Irina Ivanova across three episodes of the 2024 series Zorro. In February 2025 Disney+ released Entre paredes, a romantic comedy starring Aislinn Derbez in which she plays Silvana, and in March 2025 Netflix launched Welcome to the Family, a comedy that bills her as Olga alongside Marimar Vega and Erika Buenfil. Santita premiered on Netflix on April 22, 2026: Rodrigo García’s series stars Paulina Dávila as María José Cano and Gael García Bernal, and gives Layevska Sierra, the protagonist’s American sister-in-law, a mother who pretends not to know her teenage daughter is seeing a married man. Layevska said she understood the woman as a mother herself, and that for her, working with García was the project of her dreams.

The newest credit is in cinemas. Un mal partido, Salvador Espinosa’s comedy, opened across Mexico on October 8, 2026, with Mauricio Ochmann as Guillermo, an overprotective father convinced nobody deserves his daughter Mía, played by Loreto Peralta, until she starts dating the clumsy, likeable Martín of José Antonio Toledano. Layevska plays Mía’s mother, whose life is upended by the boyfriend’s arrival. The film reunites her with Sara Maldonado, her co-lead from El juego de la vida more than two decades ago, now cast with Roberto Duarte as the other couple of parents. Produced by Pampa Films and distributed by Buena Vista International, it was shot in Mexico City and in Amanalco, in the State of Mexico.

Off screen she has been married since April 2014 to the businessman Rodrigo Moreira, whom she wed in Morelos; their daughter Masha was born in December 2017 and their son Santiago in 2020. Asked what the young star of El juego de la vida would make of her now, she answered that it would surprise her to find a mother of two, which was not her main goal in her twenties and is now, she said, one of the biggest gifts of her life. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the city of her birth became headline news, and she spoke of the war in personal terms. “It hurts me a lot, and it hurts more not being able to do anything but pray for peace,” she told Chic Magazine, describing a fan on the Moldovan border who wrote to say that the trailer of Código implacable had been a balm for her soul.

The question her next jobs will answer is whether the industry that keeps reading her as money and distance will give her the dramas she is now asking for out loud. Her own record suggests where she will push. A director took her for an American, and she insisted on staying American. When a comedy cast her as the snob, she made the snob the character viewers wrote letters about. With Un mal partido still in Mexican theatres and Santita on Netflix, the violinist’s daughter from Kyiv is negotiating the terms of the type in public, and so far she is winning more of the argument than the casting sheets would predict.