María Becerra

Quilmes smells of wet asphalt and auto repair shops when evening falls. From this corner of Greater Buenos Aires came a teenager who talked to herself in front of a cheap camera and edited monologues of household comedy with pirated software. Before singing in front of crowds, she learned to hold the lens's gaze without blinking.

In 2015, she opened her YouTube channel with homemade videos in which she shared teenage anecdotes and parodied her school environment. Those pieces bordered on deliberate ridiculousness, yet they built up three million subscribers who waited for each weekly upload. It was a profitable venture for an eighteen-year-old girl from a hardworking middle-class family. But in 2019, she decided to erase that identity in one stroke and shut herself away in a recording studio.

That was a deliberate slammed door.

Many of her fans didn't understand the move. Trading the comfort of guaranteed gigs for trap and Latin pop beats looked like a leap without a safety net. In September 2019, she released her first studio work, the extended play 222, with just three urban tracks blending hip hop and R&B with a Buenos Aires accent. It was enough to catch the attention of producers in Buenos Aires for her raspy timbre.

The Leap Into the Language of Major Studios

When Hollywood executives looked for a female voice from the Southern Cone for the theme song of Fast X in 2023, her name landed on director Louis Leterrier's desk. The film needed an aggressive pulse to set the mood for street racing, and Becerra delivered Te Cura. She then flew to Miami to shoot a music video with the Universal Studios crew, surrounded by race cars and cameras on telescopic cranes.

On that same shoot, she made a brief cameo at the starting line alongside Vin Diesel. Only a few seconds on screen, but the experience on big-budget sets revived an old childhood ambition tied to dramatic arts.

And the gamble paid off.

The following year, in 2024, production company Illumination Entertainment called her in to audition for the neutral Spanish dub of Despicable Me 4. The singer had to go through two full days of phonetic training to suppress her Argentine voseo and bring to life Poppy Prescott, the ambitious teenager who wants to become a villain. The dubbing director ruled out her natural accent at the first audition and made her modulate high notes over eight-hour sessions locked in a soundproof booth.

From the Microphone to the Prison Module

Sebastián Ortega wasn't looking for a famous singer to make an easy promotional move when he conceived the prison project En el barro. The creator of the award-winning series El marginal needed faces that could withstand the harshness of a women's prison yard, and in mid-2024 he proposed an on-camera audition. The role assigned to her was Cleo, a young inmate trapped in the cellblocks of La Quebrada.

The Netflix production had to fit her participation into a ten-day shooting schedule due to her international commitments. Days at the abandoned prison ran from six in the morning, amid fake mud, scar makeup, and fight rehearsals choreographed by stunt performers.

She accepted the challenge without hesitation.

For the most violent physical sequences, the crew used body doubles due to production insurance requirements, but she shot the close-ups and the dialogue confrontations in real cells with no climate control. Besides playing Cleo, she composed the cumbia 7 VIDAS for the show's opening title sequence. The final mix of the track was completed in Buenos Aires with four percussion tracks and vocal compression tuned to the platform's sound standards.