Camilla de Lucas, the YouTuber who had to prove she was an actress

Camilla de Lucas

Photo: Multishow / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 13, 1994 Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Occupation	Actress and digital content creator
Known for	Burning Betrayal, Beast Race

In one scene of Beast Race, the Brazilian science-fiction film set in a ruined Rio de Janeiro where the poor run through the streets dressed as animals so the rich can bet on them, Camilla de Lucas stands beside Rodrigo Santoro and fixes his clothes. Her character, Kelly, is the youngest of the three wives of Abu, the showman who runs the game, and she has described her as the one who takes care of his image, because a man who presides over a spectacle has to look the part. It is a supporting role. It is also the most convincing reply yet to the question that has followed her since she left the phone screen: whether a creator whose online videos were already small performances could be accepted as an actress.

At one point the question came from a trade union. De Lucas has answered it the slow way, one part at a time, without giving up the audience that made her famous.

Raised in Nova Iguaçu, in the Baixada Fluminense outside Rio de Janeiro, the daughter of Maria Lucia and Marco Lucas, Camilla Jesus Santos de Lucas, who was born on 13 October 1994, was studying accounting when the YouTube channel she opened in 2017 began to grow, and she put the course on hold. The pandemic did the rest. In 2020 her TikTok videos multiplied her following across every platform, brands began to call, and the agency Mynd8, linked to the singer Preta Gil, took her on. That same year Forbes Brasil put her on its Under 30 list in the web category, and she was already counted among the most influential Black creators on the Brazilian internet.

Television came next. TV Globo cast her in the 21st season of Big Brother Brasil, which premiered in January 2021 and drew some of the largest public votes in the show’s history. De Lucas reached the final against Juliette Freire and Fiuk and finished second, with 5.23 percent of the vote to Juliette’s 90.15 percent. Inside the house she became the confidante of João Luiz Pedrosa after the singer Rodolffo Matthaus compared the hair of a monster costume he had been made to wear with João Luiz’s hair, and the two turned the remark into one of the season’s arguments about race.

The aftermath was less comfortable. She had spoken on the show about wearing wigs during her hair transition, and when she appeared in public after the finale with a new straight wig, she was attacked online for it. The singer Iza came to her defence with a video about lace wigs and a line that travelled widely, saying that nobody was going to tell a Black woman how to wear her hair. Globo kept her on screen with a segment of her own on The Masked Singer Brasil, the show hosted by Ivete Sangalo, and in November 2021 she walked the runway at São Paulo Fashion Week, returning to it in June 2022.

Her acting began inside the same industry that had made her a celebrity. In 2022 she joined Novelei, the comedy web series produced by Estúdios Globo for YouTube Originals, in which digital creators and veteran actors such as Tony Ramos restage classic telenovelas; she played Ruth in the episode built around Mulheres de Areia. Netflix followed with a guest part in the second season of Smother-in-Law (A Sogra Que Te Pariu) and then her first film, Burning Betrayal (O Lado Bom de Ser Traída), directed by Diego Freitas and released on 25 October 2023. She played Patty, the best friend of Giovanna Lancellotti’s protagonist, a woman she described as bold and funny, the one who gives the heroine the push the plot needs.

The film became a global hit for the platform, and within a week it brought her the most public challenge of her career. Hugo Gross, president of SATED-RJ, the Rio de Janeiro performers’ union, told the columnist Mariana Morais that De Lucas held neither the DRT registration that Brazilian law requires of professional actors nor a provisional authorisation, and that Netflix would be notified for breaching Law 6.533/78. She did not argue. “I’m still in the process, but I’m studying,” she said. The episode is easy to read as gatekeeping, and it partly was, but it also named something real about how streaming platforms in Brazil cast: followers count, and a large audience can open a door that training alone would not. Nor was the reality-show version of her as spotless as her fans remember. Early in the season she celebrated when the actor Lucas Penteado walked out of the house after clashing with her, at a moment when most of the other housemates had turned against him. The story of the deserving outsider leaves those parts out.

Since then the work has accumulated. In February 2025 Globoplay released Confia: Sonho de Cria, a romantic comedy from Estúdios Globo set on the outskirts of Rio and led by MC Cabelinho, in which she plays Andressa. Later that year Netflix brought her in as one of the celebrity commentators reacting to the fifth season of Casamento às Cegas Brasil. In March 2026 she made a guest appearance in Juntas & Separadas, the first series written by Thalita Rebouças for Globoplay.

The same month, Beast Race (Corrida dos Bichos) had its world premiere at South by Southwest. Co-directed by Fernando Meirelles with Rodrigo Pesavento and Ernesto Solis, and made by O2 Filmes for Prime Video, it puts her in a cast that includes Santoro, Grazi Massafera and Raquel Karro as Abu’s other wives, along with Anitta, Seu Jorge, Isis Valverde and Bruno Gagliasso. The film arrived on Prime Video on 7 August 2026, and Brazilian press reported it as the platform’s most watched non-English-language film in its first week.

Away from sets, De Lucas has been with Mateus Ricardo since 2019; they became engaged on her birthday in October 2021 and married in Rio on 13 May 2023. In April 2026 she disclosed that she had been diagnosed with endometriosis after years of pain she had taken for ordinary cramps, and she has since told Quem that she fears it could affect her plans to have children.

Meirelles has said that if Beast Race works there will be two more films. No further role for De Lucas has been announced, and the next part will say more about her than any union letter or vote percentage did: whether directors now call her for the actress, and not for the audience she brings with her.

Tags: actors, actresses, Giovanna Lancellotti, Burning Betrayal, Camilla de Lucas, Fernando Meirelles, Rodrigo Santoro

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