Malina Weissman played other actresses’ younger selves; Coven Academy makes her the lead

Malina Weissman

Photo: Kevin Payravi / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 12, 2003 New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Nine Lives, Ick

Before anyone gave Malina Weissman a character of her own, she was hired to play the past of someone else’s. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles she was the girl April O’Neil had been before she grew into Megan Fox. In Supergirl she was Kara Zor-El as a child, the prologue to Melissa Benoist. It is an odd apprenticeship. You are cast for a resemblance, asked to plant gestures another performer will inherit, and written out as soon as the story catches up with its star. Weissman did that job twice before a streaming series handed her a heroine nobody else was going to finish.

New York made the early speed possible. Weissman was born in the city and has kept it as her base ever since. She worked in front of a still camera before she worked in front of a moving one: from the age of eight she modelled for labels including Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s and DKNY, and commercials followed. A child who can hold a pose for a fashion photographer can usually hold a mark on a set, and casting directors in the city needed girls who could be matched, feature by feature, to adult stars.

The film debut came in 2014 with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which opened five months after her eleventh birthday; she was born on March 12, 2003. The following year she began her eight episodes as young Kara on CBS’s Supergirl, with a two-episode turn as Renee Epstein in the comedy Difficult People alongside it. In 2016 she had a small part in Thirsty and a real one in Nine Lives, as Rebecca Brand, the daughter of a tycoon played by Kevin Spacey whose mind ends up trapped inside the family cat. Jennifer Garner played her mother. The film was mauled by reviewers, which did little harm to a child actor and taught her nothing about carrying a story.

Violet Baudelaire did. From 2017 to 2019, across 25 episodes of Netflix‘s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Weissman played the eldest of Daniel Handler’s three orphans, the inventor who ties her hair back with a ribbon when she is about to build her way out of a disaster. Barry Sonnenfeld set the tone, Neil Patrick Harris played Count Olaf in a sequence of increasingly bad disguises, Patrick Warburton narrated as Lemony Snicket, and Louis Hynes played her brother Klaus. Over three seasons Weissman grew up on camera inside a single role, something no part before it had allowed. She later said Violet was the character she felt closest to precisely because she had lived with her for so long and changed with her on screen.

The tidy version of this career runs straight from Netflix to adulthood. The real one stalls. When the series ended Weissman stepped back to finish high school, and in a 2019 interview she said that, beyond acting, her dream was to become a director. For several years her public profile was frozen at fifteen, the girl with the ribbon. When she did return, it was not through prestige drama or a studio franchise but through genre work with small budgets and loud premises, a route easy to read as a step down. It is closer to a reset. Horror lets a former child actor be seen, on screen and by critics, as an adult who can be frightened, cruel or reckless, which no amount of red-carpet coverage can do.

The reset began with Ick, a creature feature by the music-video director Joseph Kahn. Weissman played Grace, a high-school student whose science teacher, played by Brandon Routh, begins to suspect he is her biological father just as a parasitic growth known as the Ick starts swallowing their town; Mena Suvari played her mother. The film had its world premiere in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024 and reached American cinemas through Fathom in July 2025. In Salvatore Sclafani’s The Hermit she played Lisa, a young woman recounting to a journalist how she survived a cannibal pig farmer played by Lou Ferrigno. In Slay, a queer slasher written by the actor Jimmi Simpson and directed by Kyra Elise Gardner, she plays Kat, the estranged best friend of an online celebrity whose circle is picked off at a remote cabin, opposite Zoey Luna, Aya Cash and Shawnee Smith. The film premiered at London’s FrightFest in August 2026, with Weissman now credited as Malina Pauli Weissman.

Then came the lead. In Coven Academy, created by Tim Federle, the writer behind High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, she plays Briar Roberts, a sharp-tongued Brooklyn teenager with strong telekinetic powers who is sent to a witch boarding school in New Orleans after her mother, Mary, is murdered. Ora Duplass and Jordan Leftwich play the two girls who become her coven, Tiffani Thiessen runs the school as headmistress Emma Graves, and Devon Sawa appears as a teacher. The project started at Disney Channel and moved to Freeform, which premiered it on October 1, 2026, as part of its 31 Nights of Halloween; the full season reached Disney+ and Hulu the next day, re-edited into 21 short chapters.

That format is the new tension in her career. The first show built around Weissman arrives cut into pieces made for a phone screen, a delivery system that rewards a face people recognise in a thumbnail more than a performance that builds across hours. Briar is also, pointedly, a girl searching for answers about her own mother, and the season’s final chapter rewrites who that mother was. After a decade of playing the earlier versions of other women, Weissman finally has a character whose origin story belongs to her.

She keeps her private life out of interviews. At the Los Angeles premiere party, held at the Ennis House, she wore a vintage Vivienne Westwood dress, a small reminder of where the work began.

No new film or series has been announced since Coven Academy launched. Whether Freeform and Disney order more chapters will decide if Briar becomes the role that replaces Violet in the public memory. The directing ambition she named as a teenager has not yet produced a credit. At 23, with a lead on her résumé, it no longer sounds like an escape plan.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Neil Patrick Harris, Supergirl, Tim Federle, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Coven Academy, Malina Weissman

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