Daniela Vega

In 2014, Daniela Vega cut hair at a salon in downtown Santiago, Chile, in the mornings and rehearsed lyric songs in the afternoons. Sebastián Lelio reached her by phone with a modest offer: a flat fee to serve as an advisor on the everyday life of trans people in the Chilean capital. Lelio was working on a script with Gonzalo Maza and needed to verify everyday details about doctors, courts and pensions.

After several weeks of interviews, the director set aside his list of casting candidates. He offered her the lead role without asking her to do a single screen test.

And the call took a new direction.

Vega had already made her on-screen debut in a supporting role in The Visit, directed by Mauricio López Fernández in 2014. That low-budget film went almost unnoticed in theaters, but it helped the actress get used to the camera. Her real training, however, came from classical singing, a discipline she had practiced since she was eight thanks to lessons from her grandmother, and from alternative stage productions such as La mujer mariposa in 2011.

A Golden Statuette and Forty Seconds on the Dolby Stage

When A Fantastic Woman premiered at the Berlinale in February of 2017, international critics focused on Vega's impassive face. Her character, Marina Vidal, carried the weight of the story in nearly every shot of the film, blending scenes of bureaucratic violence with opera arias she sang live herself.

The budget barely topped one and a half million dollars.

In March of 2018, the film won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film. That same night, the event's producers handed Vega the card to announce Sufjan Stevens' musical performance on the Dolby Theatre stage. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences thus welcomed the first trans presenter in the history of its ceremonies to a global audience that topped twenty-six million live viewers.

But her return to Chile left the actress facing a much clumsier legal framework. At the time, the Andean country lacked a gender identity law that would allow her to amend her birth certificate and the passport she used to travel to international festivals. The bill took months to move through the Chilean Congress, partly fueled by the public debate that followed the film's success.

In 2019, Vega published her autobiography Rebeldía, resistencia, amor. Its pages told, without embellishment, of her youth, her years at an all-boys school in San Miguel, and the medical transition she began at fifteen with the support of her family.

Fictional Cops and Contracts in Mexico

The streaming industry was quick to call on her for serialized projects. In 2019, she played Ysela in the Netflix production Historias de San Francisco, shot in English. The following year, she took on the role of Inspector Elisa Murillo in the Chilean police series La jauría, directed by Lucía Puenzo and distributed by Amazon Prime Video, a role she reprised in a second season filmed in 2022.

The comedy came later.

In 2022, Mexican director Manolo Caro cast her in the musical series Érase una vez… pero ya no, filmed in Spain. That same year, she worked on the Mexican thriller La rebelión, sharing the screen with Aracely Arámbula and Ana Serradilla. In 2023, she made the leap to the British production El poder, taking a supporting role alongside Toni Collette.

And in 2024 she tried her luck in the Mexican satire Technoboys, directed by Gerardo Gatica and Luis Gerardo Méndez. The film earned 4.6 out of ten points on film rating platforms and flatly divided critics.

That twenty-four-day shoot on the studio lots of Mexico City ended with a final production budget of four million dollars and a crew of one hundred twenty people.