Paz de la Huerta

Her roots on the Lower East Side

Paz de la Huerta was born in 1984 under the name María de la Paz Elizabeth de la Huerta y Bruce. The daughter of a Spanish aristocrat and a world authority on birth control, her childhood in New York moved between high society and the artistic avant-garde. She began studying acting at age four at the prestigious Buck's Rock camp.

Film soon claimed her.

In 1999, she landed her first major role in The Cider House Rules. She shared the set with Michael Caine and Charlize Theron when she was barely a teenager. That film won two Academy Awards and helped put her on the radar of the most demanding casting directors in the New York industry.

But her true place was on the margins. During the 2000s, she appeared in projects such as A Walk to Remember in 2002 and Fierce People in 2005. Her defiant gaze and drawling voice became her signature in an industry that wanted much more compliant faces.

The Rise of Boardwalk Empire

In 2010, she took on the role that changed her career. She played Lucy Danziger in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. It was a personal bet by Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter. Her performance as Nucky Thompson's mistress was raw, erratic and deeply physical.

She shot twenty-four episodes of the series between 2010 and 2011. Critics praised her ability to embody the desperation of the Prohibition era. However, her exit from the production was abrupt and coincided with a period of intense media exposure in the American tabloid press.

The industry began to see her as a risk.

Gaspar Noé chose her in 2009 to star in Enter the Void. In this experimental film shot in Tokyo, she played a woman trapped in a spiral of reincarnations and urban trauma. The shoot demanded a physical commitment that few actors would have accepted at the time.

Body, Pain and Courtrooms

In 2011, she suffered a serious accident during the shoot of Nurse 3D in Toronto. A production car ran her over while she was filming a scene, causing permanent spinal injuries. The incident led to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the production company Lionsgate that dragged on in court for years.

Then came a long professional silence. In 2017, she was one of the first women to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein of assaults that had taken place years earlier. Her statements helped build the legal movement in New York (U.S.), although she felt the major studios pushed her away after she spoke out.

Her name lives on in the credits of guerrilla cinema.

After years of legal battles and physical recovery, she returned to her creative work. In 2017, she appeared in The Last Movie Star alongside Burt Reynolds. It was a brief role in a film that reflected on the obscurity and lost fame of Hollywood's old icons.

Paz de la Huerta has never stopped being a cult figure in art-house cinema. In 2021, she appeared in the documentary The Velvet Underground, directed by Todd Haynes. Her presence in the film linked the artistic scene of classic New York with raw modernity.

In 2024, she worked on the feature film The Paradox, directed by Michael S. Rodriguez. The project was financed with private capital and shot mainly on location in California. The production wrapped its shooting schedule with a final budget of $1.2 million.