Giovanna Grigio, the Brazilian actress unlearning the smile that made her

Giovanna Grigio

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	January 19, 1998 Mauá, São Paulo, Brazil
Occupation	Actress
Known for	DJ Cinderella, Eu Fico Loko, The Park Maniac

“I lean a lot on the smile, on lightness,” Giovanna Grigio told CNN Brasil this year, talking about Mia, the self-absorbed witch she plays in the romantic comedy Trago Seu Amor. “So taking that smile away and still building a charismatic character was a delicious exercise.” A telling admission from an actress whose smile has been on duty for most of her life. Brazilian viewers watched her grow up in one register: the sunny orphan, the best friend with a plan, the girl the plot is kind to.

Mia breaks that register. She is a sorceress for hire whose kiss makes people fall in love, and she treats other people’s feelings as raw material until she falls for the woman she was paid to bewitch. Grigio calls her “morally questionable” and says the job was finding the humour in that coldness. The question under the choice is easy to state and hard to answer: will an audience that met her as a child follow her into parts that do not ask to be liked?

The work started early in Mauá, in Greater São Paulo, where Giovanna Grigio dos Santos was born on 19 January 1998. At nine she was already a reporter on Record’s variety show O Melhor do Brasil, interviewing celebrities in a children’s segment called Galerinha, and that same year she made her first screen appearance in the medium-length film Sol Para Poucos. In 2009 Band hired her as one of the presenters of Band Kids, until March 2010, when the channel dropped presenters from the slot altogether.

The audition that changed her life came at the end of 2012. SBT was remaking Chiquititas, the orphanage telenovela that had already been a hit in Brazil, and in 2013 Grigio was cast as Mili, the protagonist, a role Fernanda Souza had played in the first version. The remake ran until August 2015 and passed five hundred episodes, one of the longest runs in Brazilian television. She also sang on its soundtrack albums. When it ended she did not renew with SBT.

TV Globo picked her up almost at once. In January 2016 she joined Êta Mundo Bom! as Gerusa, a young woman raised by her grandmother who falls ill with leukaemia and dies before the story ends. A year later she played Gabi, a party-loving teenager, in Eu Fico Loko, the film adapted from YouTuber Christian Figueiredo’s books. Then came the part that gave her a second fan base. In Malhação: Viva a Diferença, from April 2017, she was Samantha Lambertini, a free-spirited musician in a school band called Os Lagostins, whose romance with Lica, played by Manoela Aliperti, drew a loud response online. “Nobody will be able to tell us how to love,” Grigio wrote on social media as the storyline took off. She returned to Samantha in 2020 for As Five, the Globoplay spin-off set six years after the characters leave school, and said she barely recognised the woman on the page.

In 2019 she co-starred with Maisa Silva and Filipe Bragança in Cinderela Pop, adapted from Paula Pimenta’s novel, as Belinha, a YouTuber who keeps trying to fix her best friend’s love life. The international step followed. Netflix cast her in Rebelde, its Mexican-produced new version of the teen phenomenon, as Emilia Alo, a Brazilian student at the Elite Way School who becomes involved with Andi. She has said she could not speak Spanish when she auditioned, rehearsed words she did not understand, and was so nervous she could not move her neck for a week. The series premiered in January 2022 and returned for a second season that July.

Lay the credits side by side and a pattern appears that her popularity tends to hide. Two remakes. A run of adaptations of bestsellers by Christian Figueiredo, Paula Pimenta and Carina Rissi. Grigio has become one of the most reliable faces Brazilian producers can put on a title that arrives with an audience already attached, and that reliability has a cost: the property comes first and the actress second. Rebelde is the warning. Built on nostalgia for the original, it lasted two seasons, and Netflix confirmed in May 2023 that there would be no third. Even her darkest film follows the same logic. In Prime Video‘s Maníaco do Parque, released in October 2024, Silvero Pereira plays the real São Paulo serial killer Francisco de Assis Pereira, while Grigio plays Elena, a reporter created for the film. The screenplay routes a true crime through a fictional young woman, which gives viewers a way in and also returns Grigio to the plucky heroine, this time with a press badge.

Between those projects she played Sofia in Perdida, released in July 2023, the Star Original Productions adaptation of Carina Rissi’s novel about a young woman who buys a new phone and finds herself in the nineteenth century. A sequel, Encontrada, is in production with Bruno Montaleone back at her side, and she has described the new Sofia as a character who moves away from romantic idealisation.

The turn became visible in 2026. Trago Seu Amor, directed by Claudia Castro, opened in Brazilian cinemas on 11 June. On 17 August TV Globo premiered Por Você, its new seven o’clock novela and her first since Malhação ended in 2018. She plays Leandra, a resident doctor at the Hospital & Maternidade Luz who keeps seeking the approval of her mother, Vanessa, played by Alinne Moraes, and who is the daughter of Gabriel, played by Thiago Lacerda, and the granddaughter of Renata Sorrah’s Pérola. “As a little girl watching novelas, they were the ones I was in love with,” she told Caras, calling the casting “a planetary alignment” that put her biggest inspirations inside her screen family.

Off screen she keeps a fairly narrow public profile. She told Vogue Brasil in 2017 that she was bullied at school by girls who shut her out and gave her cruel nicknames, and in July 2024 she made public her relationship with the model Guilherme Paganini.

The next test arrives on 18 November 2026, when Netflix releases Os 12 Signos de Valentina, an eight-episode Boutique Filmes series based on Ray Tavares’s novel. Grigio plays Valentina, who is cheated on, blames astrology and sets out to date one man of each sign while recording it all for a videocast. It is, once again, a bestseller with a readership waiting for it. She calls the role “a watershed” that demanded a kind of commitment she had not given before. Whether that intensity reads on screen as hers, rather than the book’s, will decide what kind of actress the Mili generation sees next.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Giovanna Grigio, Rebelde, Chiquititas, Malhação: Viva a Diferença

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