Matheus Souza, the director whose heartbreaks became Disney+’s Benefits with Friends

Matheus Souza

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	1988 Brasília, Federal District, Brazil
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Awards	Festival do Rio · São Paulo International Film Festival · Prêmio Netflix

Bruna Marquezine once described Matheus Souza, from a stage at Disney‘s fan convention in Brazil, as the Taylor Swift of drama writing. For most of his career Souza has written about the same material, the breakups of people in their twenties and the conversations they have when it is already too late, and he has never pretended it comes from anywhere but his own life. What has changed is the size of the room. The director who once shot a whole feature inside his university, because the borrowed cameras were not allowed off campus, now makes a Disney+ series sold on the promise of real disappointments, a good share of them his.

Souza, who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, traces his choice of career to a specific humiliation. He has described himself as an overweight, bespectacled boy with bad skin who was bullied at school when he watched a Woody Allen film and noticed that a man in worse shape than him still ended up with Julia Roberts. That, he told the Globo news portal, was when he decided what to do with his life. Allen remained his model, along with Charlie Kaufman and François Truffaut: writers who direct, which is what he set out to become.

He was born in Brasília in 1988, and he was 20 and in his third semester at PUC-Rio, the Catholic university in Rio, when he made Apenas o Fim. The university’s rules shaped the film: its cameras could only be used during the holidays and could not leave the grounds, so the whole story takes place on campus. A young woman who has decided to run away gives her boyfriend one last hour of conversation, in the manner of Richard Linklater‘s Before Sunrise. It cost R$8,000. Its cast, led by Gregório Duvivier and Érika Mader, with Nathalia Dill and Marcelo Adnet, was not yet famous. The film won audience awards at the Festival do Rio in 2008 and at the São Paulo International Film Festival, and Domingos Oliveira started telling people that Souza was the face of a new generation.

In October 2013 Apenas o Fim won the first Prêmio Netflix, a public vote among independent Brazilian features that put the winner in Netflix’s international catalogue. Souza accepted with a joke, calling himself the biggest loser of everyone involved in the film, since so much of his cast had become famous in the meantime.

By then he had learned how little a festival prize pays. Unable to raise money for a second feature, he took a screenwriting commission and spent the fee on Eu Não Faço a Menor Ideia do que Eu Tô Fazendo com a Minha Vida, a comedy about a medical student, played by Clarice Falcão, who skips classes to work out what she actually wants. He has said he stopped paying his bills for two or three months to make it, on a budget of about R$20,000; it opened the Brazilian competition at Gramado in 2012. He also wrote the screenplay of Confissões de Adolescente, the film version of Maria Mariana’s teenage diaries directed by Daniel Filho and Cris D’Amato.

That double life is the most useful way to read his career, and it is less flattering than the prodigy story the Brazilian press told about him in his early twenties. His most personal work has repeatedly been his smallest. When the self-funded second feature reached cinemas in December 2013, it played on about ten screens and, in the blunt words of the magazine Exame, did not draw many people, while Confissões de Adolescente, the commission, was heading for more than 400. A rotoscoped feature he announced in 2012, Não Deixe a Júlia Ir Embora, with himself in the lead, does not appear among his released films. For a decade the commissions reached the multiplexes, while the films he wrote for himself lived on festival screens and, later, on streaming.

He wrote, directed and starred in Tamo Junto in 2016, and acted for others, playing the singer Orlando Silva in Andrucha Waddington’s Chacrinha: O Velho Guerreiro. He created Cinco Júlias as a stage musical about teenage girls who share a first name and turned it into a young-adult novel published in 2019. Ana e Vitória, in 2018, built a romantic musical comedy around the pop duo Anavitória and moved to Netflix two months after its cinema release. He also co-wrote René Sampaio’s Eduardo e Mônica, the Legião Urbana adaptation released in 2022.

When the pandemic halted his other work in 2020, he kept writing and sent the pages to friends first. “Whenever I finish writing a film, I’m very cruel to myself. I’m my own biggest hater,” he told Elle Brasil. Me Sinto Bem Com Você, five stories of people reaching each other at a distance, was rehearsed over Zoom, shot in two weeks and released on Amazon Prime Video in May 2021, with Souza playing opposite Manu Gavassi, one of the first readers and the one who pushed hardest for it to be made. He insisted it was a film about relationships, not about the pandemic. Two features followed in 2023: A Última Festa, a graduation-night story shot in Portuguese palaces, and Tá Escrito, with Larissa Manoela as an astronomy student whose written predictions start coming true.

Amor da Minha Vida, released internationally as Benefits with Friends, is where the two halves of his career meet. Souza created and wrote the Disney+ series, which premiered in November 2024 with Marquezine as Bia, a committed single woman, and Sérgio Malheiros as Victor, her closest friend. René Sampaio is the general director; Souza directs episodes with him and Tatiana Fragoso, and Marquezine co-directs. The disappointments on screen are partly his and partly hers, as she told the convention crowd. The scale is new: Guia da Semana called it the biggest Brazilian premiere on the platform, and it collected five nominations at the 2025 Produ Awards.

The second season arrived on Disney+ on 9 October 2026, with Bryan Ruffo and Luíza Fazio sharing the writing. Monica Albuquerque, Disney’s vice president of original content for Latin America, told Folha de S.Paulo that a third season was already being scripted before the second went out.

Two more openings carry his name before the year ends. On 23 October his musical version of Confissões de Adolescente, which he wrote and directs from a new story by Maria Mariana, opens at the EcoVilla Ri Happy in Rio’s Jardim Botânico with Flor Gil in the lead. And Cinco Júlias, his film of his own novel, with Jade Picon among the Júlias, is listed for Brazilian cinemas on 24 December. The man who once let the power and gas be cut off to finish a film is now booked into a theatre, the multiplexes and a streaming slate at once, still writing about what young people say to each other when it is almost too late.

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Tags: Bruna Marquezine, Benefits with Friends, Brazilian cinema, Matheus Souza, Apenas o Fim, Cinco Júlias

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