Karla Souza

Karla Souza

Born	December 11, 1985 Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation	Actress, Film Producer
Known for	Instructions Not Included, Day Shift, We Are the Nobles
Awards	3 Emmy · Golden Globe · CCP

On June 5, 2026, Netflix releases México 86, a series about the political campaign to bring the World Cup to Mexico, and Karla Souza plays Susana Gómez-Mont, the journalist documenting it from the inside. Across the streaming landscape the same week, she is also midway through her run as Detective Lee Reardon, a Boston homicide investigator in the Amazon series 56 Days. Two productions, two languages, one actress who has spent twenty years learning how to operate in both.

Born in Mexico City on December 11, 1985, Souza trained before she performed. She enrolled at Televisa’s Centro de Educación Artística in Mexico City, crossed to France for four years as a professional stage actress, and then earned a BA in Acting from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama in 2008, recognized at graduation with the school’s CCP Most Promising Actress award. By the time she returned to screen work, she was fluent in Spanish, English, and French and had spent more of her twenties in Europe than in the country where she was born.

Mexican cinema found her first. Nosotros los Nobles, in which she played Bárbara Noble — a spoiled heiress reduced to poverty alongside a family that has never once worked — became one of the highest-grossing films in Mexican cinema history and ran for months on domestic screens. That same year, Instructions Not Included, the Eugenio Derbez Spanish-English crossover she joined as Jackie, crossed $100 million at the worldwide box office and earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. Two films in one calendar year, and her standing in the Spanish-language industry was not a rising story but a settled one.

The American phase began the following year. ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder cast her as Laurel Castillo, a first-year law student in Annalise Keating’s circle; Souza spent five seasons building a character who starts the series as its most restrained player into one of its most volatile, earning a Primetime Emmy nomination for supporting actress. The role required working almost entirely in English inside a production structure oriented around Viola Davis — one of the most technically demanding performances in American network television — and finding a version of Laurel distinct from the ensemble without overpowering it, a balance she held across 78 episodes.

After How to Get Away with Murder ended in 2020, Souza widened her range across both industries simultaneously. She appeared in Amazon Prime’s El Presidente alongside the FIFA corruption storylines, played Marina Hayworth across three seasons of ABC’s Home Economics, and added producer credit to her role as Mariel Saenz in La Caída. The film — released internationally as Dive — won her the International Emmy for Best Actress in 2023; she also collected the International Emmy for Best TV Movie or Miniseries as producer, two awards for the same project earned from entirely different sets of responsibilities.

The same year brought Day Shift, a Netflix action thriller in which she played Audrey San Fernando, a vampire antagonist cast explicitly against the most familiar Latin American female archetypes — a figure positioned as reclaiming California rather than being rescued from it. In February 2018, she had publicly disclosed that she was sexually assaulted at age 22 by a television director, choosing to name the act without pressing charges. In 2024, her brother Adrián Olivares — the first Mexican member of Menudo — died following surgery complications at age 48.

That November, she was appointed UN Women National Goodwill Ambassador for Mexico, with a mandate covering violence against women, care work, and gender equality in media and sports. The appointment formalized a public role she had already been building for years: the actress who speaks in three languages, who disclosed assault in a media culture that often punishes that disclosure, who won an International Emmy for a Spanish-language film after years in English-language television.

México 86, directed by Gabriel Ripstein and co-starring Diego Luna, is the latest production to put her in the position she has occupied since 2013 — working at the intersection of two industries, each of which has more claim on her than the other is typically willing to acknowledge. As Susana Gómez-Mont, she plays the figure documenting that intersection from inside it. She will be on both sides of the border at once this summer. She has been before.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Diego Luna, Gabriel Ripstein, Karla Souza, Mexico 86

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