Alanis Guillen, the Pantanal actress whose fans rewrote Globo’s plans for her

Alanis Guillen

Photo: Portal ArteBlitz / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 20, 1998 Santo André, São Paulo, Brazil
Occupation	Actress
Awards	Prêmio Geração Glamour · GQ Men of the Year Brasil

Globo did not plan the love story that put Alanis Guillen in front of a global audience. Lorena Ferette was a supporting part in Três Graças: the villain’s daughter, an activist with a short fuse, one thread among dozens in Aguinaldo Silva’s nine o’clock telenovela. Then fans of Girls Love, a genre that usually lives on Thai series, started asking on X who the woman with the dimples was, and the network did something it rarely does for a secondary couple. It gave Lorena and her girlfriend a show of their own, shot vertically for phones.

That turn says a good deal about where Guillen’s career actually gets decided. Television first sold her as something untamed, Juma Marruá of Pantanal, a young woman raised in the wetlands who becomes a jaguar when cornered. The public that found her later met someone else entirely, the stubborn, funny half of a sapphic couple. The role waiting on her calendar breaks with both.

She grew up in Santo André, in the industrial belt outside São Paulo, where she was born on 20 May 1998, the youngest of three children of the architect Valéria Guillen and Fúlvio Caratella, a bassist on the city’s night-music circuit. The first name was her father’s idea, borrowed from Alanis Morissette. She was shooting television commercials as a child, for clients such as Nestlé and Mercado Livre, and later trained in São Paulo’s independent theatre scene, with the TAPA study group and the troupe Cia. de Teatro Nóis na Mala, before the short film Ser o Que Se É gave her a first screen credit in 2018.

Television found her at 21. Globo cast her as Rita, one of the leads of Malhação: Toda Forma de Amar, the 2019 season of its long-running teen soap. When the COVID-19 shutdown halted recording in 2020, the finale was pulled forward by around fifteen chapters, and the young protagonists narrated what viewers would no longer get to see.

Then came Juma. When Globo set out to remake Pantanal, Benedito Ruy Barbosa’s 1990 telenovela, in a new adaptation by Bruno Luperi, the jaguar woman was the part with the heaviest memory attached; Cristiana Oliveira had made it famous a generation earlier. Guillen had never watched the original. Strangers online kept tagging her as the obvious choice, so she looked up the story and sent a self-tape. Casting producer Rosane Quintaes had already put her name at the top of the list, and artistic director Rogério Gomes called her in-person test brilliant. Luperi’s requirement was simpler: the actress needed the jaguar’s gaze, and he decided she had it. Globo announced her on the Sunday news magazine Fantástico in September 2021, when she was 23.

The preparation was physical in a way telenovela work seldom is. She took kung fu and riding lessons, worked on her accent with a prosody coach, spent days barefoot and nights in the open, and, as a vegetarian, went back to eating meat for the part. Pantanal ran to 167 episodes in Globo’s prime-time slot in 2022 and became a ratings success, with Jesuíta Barbosa as Jove, the young man who falls for Juma. The jaguar followed her out of the studio. In 2023 she voiced Leventina, a real jaguar, in the documentary Diário de uma Onça, filmed with the conservation group Onçafari, and conceded to Folhapress that the association had become hard to shake, without seeming in any hurry to.

The years right after Pantanal are where the official story of her rise gets too tidy. Her return to the nine o’clock slot was Mania de Você, João Emanuel Carneiro’s telenovela, in a recurring role as Michele, the decent younger sister of Mariana Ximenes’s scheming Ísis, whose move to Portugal with her boyfriend turns into a trap. It was solid work and a clear step down from a title role. The jump that followed came from viewers. Her couple with Gabriela Medvedovsky in Três Graças went viral outside Brazil, and Globo answered with Loquinha, a 25-chapter vertical microdrama on its social channels that passed 198 million views and was then subtitled in English and Spanish; the network’s marketing director described it as a project born from engagement captured in real time. The price shows in her credits. Since an Audible audio drama in August 2025, every role she has released has cast her as a woman in love with another woman. For an actress who has said she would rather not label her own sexuality, the audience that rescued her career is also the one most likely to narrow it.

The current run shows how strong that demand is. The second season of Vermelho Sangue, the Globoplay series by Rosane Svartman and Claudia Sardinha that mixes the supernatural with Brazilian folklore, premiered on 17 September 2026 and turned her character, Flora, into a vampire in a romance with Laura Dutra’s Celina, a pairing fans had already nicknamed Florina. Three weeks later, on 9 October, the second season of Disney+‘s Benefits with Friends, known in Brazil as Amor da Minha Vida, introduced her as Giovana, the woman who enters Bia’s life just as her relationship with Victor starts to fray. Bia is played by Bruna Marquezine. In the audio drama No Espaço Entre Nós, directed by Bianca Comparato, she had already played Maitê, a psychologist who falls for an artificial intelligence voiced by Alice Carvalho.

Off screen she talks about her life sparingly. In a 2022 interview with the magazine Elástica she described her sexuality as fluid and called saying so a liberation, and she trains in muay thai. Her father died in October 2024, while she was on air in Mania de Você; she said goodbye on Instagram with a letter that called him her light and her guide.

The next project is the one that could reset the pattern. In Paraíso Perdido, a 40-chapter Globoplay telenovela by George Moura and Sergio Goldenberg loosely drawn from Nelson Rodrigues, she plays Maria Cecília Werneck, the youngest daughter of a bus magnate played by Alexandre Nero. Her father sees her as pure; early in the story she is involved in a man’s death and keeps lying to bury it, while carrying on an affair with her sister’s husband. Recording began at Estúdios Globo in September 2026, with a premiere expected in the first half of 2027. After a run of roles built on tenderness, Guillen’s first full-length telenovela lead since Juma asks the audience that adopted her to stay while she does something unforgivable.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Bruna Marquezine, Benefits with Friends, Alanis Guillen, Brazilian television

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