Laia Costa

Laia Costa spent eight hours a day writing account strategies at an advertising agency in Barcelona before stepping onto a professional set. She was twenty-five years old with a permanent contract, but in no hurry to catch anyone's attention in the industry.

She started in evening acting classes purely as a break from work, but the craft hooked her all at once. In 2011 she accepted a recurring role in the daily series Bandolera and quit the office.

There was no turning back.

In Spain she went on to make supporting appearances in TV productions such as Polseres vermelles in 2013 and Carlos, Rey Emperador in 2015. The local circuit seemed to typecast her in docile roles, though she was looking for projects with less makeup and more real risk.

The Berlin Heist in a Single Take

In 2015, German director Sebastian Schipper handed her a script of barely twelve pages with no fixed dialogue for Victoria. The technical premise looked like commercial suicide: the film would be shot in one real continuous take through the streets of Kreuzberg and Mitte, crossing twenty-two locations without cutting the camera for a single second.

They made three full attempts across three different early mornings. The first rehearsal came out flat and the second was a useless mess, so the third take, shot between 4:30 and 7:00 in the morning was the one that reached movie theaters intact.

Nobody on the team had a backup plan in case someone tripped.

Costa carried the dramatic weight of the 140-minute runtime with a physical intensity that unsettled European critics. That Berlin night earned her the Lola award for Best Actress, making her the first foreign actress to win the German Film Academy's award, and she also received a BAFTA nomination in 2017.

And offers from outside Spain soon followed.

Instead of moving to Los Angeles to chase generic auditions, Costa managed her schedule between London and Catalonia with a fair amount of indifference to industry glamour. In 2017 she shot the drama Newness under the direction of Drake Doremus, and the following year she starred in Only You opposite Josh O’Connor, an intimate story about fertility shot in Glasgow that confirmed her preference for human conflict without artifice.

Raw Motherhood and the Mud of La Rioja

In 2019, Isabel Coixet wrote the series Foodie Love for her, exploring generational doubts between coffee shops and urban travel. But her real acting impact in her home country took a little longer to take shape.

In 2022, director Alauda Ruiz de Azúa trusted her to star in Cinco lobitos. The character of Amaia, a first-time mother overwhelmed by caregiving in a Biscay apartment, was built on silence, suppressed crying and everyday friction with Susi Sánchez. For this role, Costa won the Goya Award for Best Actress in 2023 after taking the Silver Biznaga at the Málaga Film Festival.

That same year she premiered two other feature films that rejected complacency: Els encantats by Elena Trapé, which portrayed the isolation of a newly separated woman in the Pyrenees, and El maestro que prometió el mar by Patricia Font. So when Isabel Coixet invited her to adapt Sara Mesa's novel in Un amor during 2023, Costa agreed to inhabit a harsh role, full of contradictions and surrounded by rural hostility.

And the gamble paid off.

The film earned her another Goya nomination in 2024, reinforcing a filmography where dramatic discomfort takes priority over audience sympathy. In 2022 she was also credited as associate producer on the feature Suro, directed by Mikel Gurrea, which competed at the San Sebastián Film Festival.

In 2025, the actress joined the Dublin shoot of the new version of The Mummy, directed by Lee Cronin for Universal Pictures and produced by James Wan. The shoot wrapped its Irish schedule with a technical budget set at 80 million dollars.