Laia Costa, the Spanish actress whose best work keeps happening at home

Laia Costa

Photo: Pedro J Pacheco / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 18, 1985 Barcelona, Spain
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Lee Cronin's The Mummy, I Want You, Victoria
Awards	German Film · Gaudí · Goya · Feroz · 2 Platino

For a decade, English-language cinema has kept introducing Laia Costa as a discovery, and each introduction has had to start from scratch. Berlin met her running through a city at night in one unbroken shot; Hollywood met her this spring as the mother in a Blumhouse horror film. The work that has defined her, though, was made in Spanish and Catalan on modest budgets, about women looking after someone else, and that is where the prizes have gone.

She did not grow up wanting any of it. Costa was raised in Horta, on the hilly northern edge of Barcelona, the elder daughter of an accountant and of one of the city’s first women taxi drivers. She played basketball for seventeen years, as a point guard. She has called acting an accident: there were no actors around her, and when it was time to choose a degree it did not register as a profession. She studied advertising, public relations and marketing at Blanquerna, the communication school of Ramon Llull University, and went to work as an account executive.

A job with fixed hours at a German company gave her free evenings, and she spent them in theatre classes with her younger sister Noemí at the Nancy Tuñón school. Costa, who was born on 18 February 1985, was in her mid-twenties by then. She followed it with two years in casting director Luci Lenox’s acting-in-English course, the training that would later make her career portable. Television came first, with the daily series Bandolera in 2011 and then Rym, a girl with breast cancer, in the second season of Polseres vermelles. On stage at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya she played a part written entirely in German in Atraco, paliza y muerte en Agbanäspach, learning every line by heart. It reads now like a rehearsal.

Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria premiered at the Berlinale in 2015: 134 minutes, a single take, most of the dialogue improvised, with Costa as a young Spaniard in Berlin who drifts from a nightclub into a bank robbery before dawn. Schipper’s rule for his cast was never to repeat a sentence or an action, even when the scene was not working. The performance won her the German Film Award for Best Actress, the first time a foreign actress had taken the Lola, along with the Gaudí Award and a European Film Award nomination. In 2017 she was nominated for the BAFTA Rising Star Award.

The English-language offers arrived quickly. She starred opposite Nicholas Hoult in Drake Doremus’s Newness, then made five features released in 2018, among them Nicolas Pesce’s Piercing with Christopher Abbott and Mia Wasikowska, Miguel Arteta’s Duck Butter with Alia Shawkat, and Maine, on which she was also executive producer. The best of that run was Harry Wootliff’s debut, Only You, with Josh O’Connor: Costa played Elena, a woman whose relationship with a younger man begins to break under the strain of failed attempts at a child. Mark Kermode called her performance flawless. Isabel Coixet then gave her the lead in the HBO Europe series Foodie Love, which earned her a Feroz nomination, and she joined Patrick Dempsey in the financial drama Devils.

That record also shows the limit of how she has been used abroad. The projects that gave her the most room were the smallest. Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself, with Oscar Isaac and Antonio Banderas, was mauled by critics, scoring 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, even though A. O. Scott in The New York Times singled out Costa and Sergio Peris-Mencheta as the couple worth watching. Amazon’s The Wheel of Time cast her as Moghedien, the Forsaken known as the Spider and her first villain; she worked with a movement coach on how spiders move and feed and borrowed the uninhibited energy of her young daughter. The series was cancelled in May 2025 after three seasons. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, released by Warner Bros. on 17 April 2026, made her Larissa Cannon, the wife of Jack Reynor’s journalist, whose long-missing daughter comes home possessed. It grossed $90.6 million on a $22 million budget, yet reviews were split, at 47% on Rotten Tomatoes. Costa had avoided horror since adolescence.

At home the material has been built around her instead. Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s Cinco lobitos, released in English as Lullaby, premiered in the Berlinale’s Panorama in 2022 with Costa as Amaia, a first-time mother who goes back to her parents for help and finds the care has to flow the other way. She received the script in the third month of her first pregnancy and has said she sensed at once that the role was hers. It brought her the Goya Award for Best Actress, the Feroz, the Forqué and the Platino, plus a shared Silver Biznaga at Málaga with Susi Sánchez. Cronin has said he cast her in The Mummy after watching the trailer for that film.

Coixet’s Un amor, adapted from Sara Mesa’s novel and premiered at San Sebastián in 2023, pushed further: Costa played Nat, a woman who moves to a remote village to rebuild her life and meets distrust from the neighbours, hostility from her landlord and a disturbing sexual proposition from the man next door. It earned her another Goya nomination and a second Platino Award for Best Actress. In February 2024 Forbes Women named her among the fifty most influential women in Spanish cinema and broadcasting.

Her newest work brings the two careers into the same frame. Collision Course, released by Netflix worldwide on 30 October 2026 under its Spanish title Colisión, is Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s first thriller, written with Ramón Campos and set around a Madrid bank robbery during the financial crisis. Costa plays Carla, heading a cast with Karra Elejalde, Luis Zahera, Tamar Novas, Álvaro Cervantes and Lluís Homar. It is her first project for the platform.

She spent six years living in Miami’s Brickell district with her husband, David López, whom she met at university, because of his job. Their daughter was born in May 2020 and their son in early 2024. She is also a certified birth doula, which makes her choice of maternal roles look less like typecasting than like a subject she knows from the inside.

No new project has been announced since Collision Course. The next one will say which way she is leaning: toward the large international productions that keep asking for her, or toward the Spanish directors who have written parts to her measure and given her the best reviews of her career.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Collision Course, Isabel Coixet, Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, The Wheel of Time

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