Barbie Ferreira is the ultimate post-internet It-girl, a straight-up Gen Z phenomenon. Before she vaulted to stardom on HBO’s debauched teen drama Euphoria, she had already been named among Time magazine’s most influential teens of 2016, along with gymnast Simone Biles and Game of Thrones’s Maisie Williams.
Her impressive modelling career for luxury fashion labels turned her into a body positivity advocate – and a role model for girls in the process. By 19, she had conquered internet fame, thanks to her viral grungey Tumblr account plastered with selfies taken sprawled across her sofa, pouting in dark purple lipstick, a silver septum ring between her nostrils. Becoming a revelation on the buzziest high-school drama since Skins, then, felt like it was already written in the stars.
As Euphoria’s Kat Hernandez – pal to Alexa Demie’s high-school bombshell Maddy Perez – Ferreira conveyed a striking naturalism as the bold yet fragile teen who reinvents herself as an internet dominatrix. Then she played the stooge to Haley Lu Richardson’s immaculate prom queen Veronica Clarke in the 2020 abortion film Unpregnant. The problem was, though, that Ferreira was so captivating as the “mysterious goth best friend” that Hollywood didn’t see her as anything else. Since she exited Euphoria in a haze of controversy in 2022, she has been turning down offers to play a regurgitated version of that sidekick character.
“I got a lot of things sent to me that were repetitive in that way,” Ferreira says from a pistachio-hued sofa in Los Angeles, her sphynx cat pawing across her lap. “I had this moment in my career a few years ago, where I was like, OK… In Hollywood, people lack a little bit of creativity when it comes to casting people. To me, that’s not exciting.”
She’s decidedly un-gothic today, in a buttermilk-yellow blouse, with subtle makeup and her brunette Euphoria bob grown out past her shoulders, as she chats from her sun-filled living room. Her new list of must-haves for an acting role, she says, includes “depth, nuance and complication” – preferably a story that “brings weirdos to the forefront”. And it must not – I repeat, not – be like anything she’s done before.
The result of Ferreira shimmying away from that stereotype is her wholesome new film, Bob Trevino Likes It, one of three independent movies she has shot since leaving the drug-soaked world of Euphoria. She plays Lily, a 25-year-old live-in carer who strikes up a platonic friendship with an older man, Bob Trevino (played by an enchanting John Leguizamo). The pair connect on Facebook while Lily is attempting to track down her emotionally abusive father (played by French Stewart) who just happens to have the same name, Robert Trevino. He has cut her off during one of his rages.
Ferreira’s performance is imbued with such complex layers of hurt that the emotions she portrays feel utterly unfeigned. Leguizamo’s Bob, who has loneliness issues of his own, becomes Lily’s unofficial surrogate father and shows her what paternal love can look and feel like in the process. It’s an indelibly affecting movie.
Ferreira’s estrangement from her own father, since the age of seven, is what drew her to Tracie Laymon’s script. “It’s been 21 years of my life that I have not had my father in it,” she tells me. “And it’s a pain that I don’t ever express. It’s something that I just accepted.” This role, then, has allowed her to address her inner child. “I was able to really express these emotions that I’ve never really expressed publicly before. There’s nothing salacious about [the film]; it’s more about the truth of it, which is being lonely and having abandonment issues, and what that means to someone, in the most real way possible.”
In a strange life-imitates-art moment, Ferreira found paternalistic figures in both Leguizamo and Stewart while shooting the film. “Having fatherly love from men who aren’t my father always feels so unusual to me, and that’s what made it perfectly awkward and weird,” she says. Ferreira noticed herself wondering during the process, “‘Do I deserve this? Can I have this?’… I really pretended like I just didn’t have a father figure for most of my life. And I think that was my way of protecting myself.”
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At early screenings of the film, she was amazed by the extent to which Lily’s relationship with her dad resonated with the audience. “You’d be surprised,” she says. “People that I’ve known for years, that I’d had no idea were so affected by it… they’re spilling all of their family secrets to me. We all have daddy issues – it’s crazy, literally everyone.”
Born Barbara Linhares Ferreira in East Harlem, New York, the actor was raised by her single mother, aunt and grandmother in Queens, and later New Jersey. Ferreira took drama classes at the Boys & Girls Club of Queens and became instantly hooked. Aged 16, while off sick from school with the flu, she took headshots and sent them off to the casting team at the now defunct but once zeitgeisty fashion brand American Apparel, with the sole aim of building a platform for her future acting career.
“I was an angsty teen in my bedroom in my mom’s house,” she says. “I never thought about modelling. I wanted to be an actor so bad. I didn’t have any parents in the industry. I really wanted to find a way to make that happen in whatever capacity that is… You’re in a sea of other people who want it as bad as you.”
In her biography on the American Apparel site, Ferreira made her goals clear from day one: “My name is Barbara and I want to be an actress.” Posing for the cameras was always a ticket into acting, but she admits she was “sucked” into the fashion world pre-Euphoria while working as a prominent curve model for luxury labels including Louis Vuitton, Chanel and American Eagle. “I learnt a lot about myself,” she says. “I was just a kid. And then, all of a sudden, I’m 18, flying to Germany and London all the time. It was very much a job. A part of it was a little bit glamorous; it felt cool to travel the world.”
Ferreira wants to level up her acting going forward – and she doesn’t care about the Hollywood paycheck. “In the past couple of years, I’ve made it a really big priority to only do projects that I’m invested in and that will make sense for me as an actor, not as a quote-unquote celebrity and not as a quote-unquote anything.”
The jobs she takes, then, are all about the long game. “It’s not always the sexiest trillion-dollar show that I just say yes to. I don’t know if anyone knows this, but it’s not lucrative to be in independent cinema.” Her words drip with sarcasm. “It’s for the love of it. I’ve been making these decisions that are for me and my craft rather than for anything else.”
Ferreira is a natural storyteller, warm and effusive, her raspy New York accent dancing through the octaves. She pauses often to discipline the many furry residents who are hell-bent on interrupting our conversation. There’s a dog called Cowboy, who is scurrying across her living room. Then there’s the hairless cat, Morty, who is creating similar havoc. “Do not drink my water!” she softly snaps at him, as if she were telling off a toddler for eating something they shouldn’t. “Cowboy!” she yells. “This is why I hate interviewing at home, because I have a zoo. I’m hoping this doesn’t get completely sidetracked by all the animals screaming at each other.”
Despite the ruckus unfolding on my Zoom screen, Ferreira seems at peace with where she’s at in her career. And I’m not surprised, given how Euphoria played out. When America’s amped-up answer to Skins – more hedonistic, more nihilistic, more beautiful – premiered to millions of viewers in 2019, Ferreira immediately impressed herself upon viewers. Millions watched as Kat – an anonymous virginal fan-fiction writer crafting viral smut about a pseudo-One Direction member called “Larry Stylinson” – re-emerged as a fully fledged camgirl. Her storyline tackled many of the Euphoria big hitters: sexual abuse, body image issues, and bullying. A lot happened.
By season two, though, Kat’s storyline had become virtually non-existent. When it became known that she wasn’t continuing for round three, rumours swirled that she had stormed off set while feuding with the show’s creator, Sam Levinson, who has faced opprobrium for what some see as the series’ gratuitous use of nudity and its glamorisation of teenage drug abuse. Several female Euphoria actors, including Sydney Sweeney in an interview with The Independent, have revealed that they asked the showrunner to tone down unnecessary nude scenes while filming it.
It didn’t help matters when Levinson’s disturbing 2023 series The Idol, which starred Lily-Rose Depp as a vulnerable pop star lured into a cult by a nightclub owner (played by musician The Weeknd), was also shrouded in controversy. Complaints of torture porn and changes in the storyline emerged after director Amy Seimetz mysteriously left during production. Ferreira has denied any disagreement with Levinson, or walking off set, saying her decision to leave Euphoria was a mutual one. On the Armchair Expert podcast in 2023, Ferreira explained that she had left because Kat’s storyline had not moved in the direction she’d wanted it to, and that she no longer wanted to play the “fat best friend”.
When Ferreira became a breakout star on the show aged 22, she told The New York Times that she saw herself in Kat “in every way”. Holding on to that feeling as season two went on, though, became more difficult.
“In season one, I was very aware of the character and where the story was going,” she says now. “Season two was a bit trickier for me because I just didn’t have as much context or much of a storyline. It’s hard to make it feel real and believable. There were a couple of times when I tried my best, and I hope it was good-ish, but you know, as an actor, you just kind of get handed…” She trails off. “You have to go with the flow with whatever’s happening. It was a different experience in season one and season two.”
Ferreira does, however, hold Kat very close to her heart. “I spent so much time with my life pouring all this love and detail into her,” she tells me. “She was the product of everything that I’ve ever done. Kat was kind of like the thesis of what I learnt in my teens, and what I think Gen Z is truly like.”
Euphoria’s remaining stars – Zendaya, Sweeney, Jacob Elordi and Hunter Schafer – are currently filming a third season. Yet Ferreira is still unaware of how Kat’s absence will be addressed when it’s released next year (so far, all we know is that there will be a time jump). Does she wonder about the future of Kat’s storyline?
“I think about it all the time,” she says. “There are so many ways that Kat could go. I’m curious to see where it ends up, if it even ends up being mentioned. Hopefully it’s something good… I’ll be watching with everyone else,” she shrugs. Maybe Kat has moved away to another state, I wonder. Perhaps she has a family. Or could the writers – I’m just riffing here – ever kill her off, say, in a random car accident? “Oh my God, I hope not. If they kill me off, I’d be like, OK…?!” howls Ferreira. “So it’s like Samantha in And Just Like That… She’s just in London. She’s living her best life. No one needs to know any details!” A message appears on my screen asking me to move away from the topic.
With Euphoria behind her, Ferreira made her Broadway debut last year as recovering drug addict Loren Montgomery in Leslye Headland’s play Cult of Love. She also nabbed a starring role and a producing credit for the forthcoming Montreal-set comedy film Mile End Kicks, in which she plays a 24-year-old music journalist. Then there’s the two indie horror films: House of Spoils (released in 2024) and a reboot of the cult 1978 low-budget hit Faces of Death, which will also feature Charli xcx.
Dedicating herself to independent projects has allowed Ferreira to work more closely with crews, have more creative input, and crucially, lead her first film. But she’s also learnt to speak up for herself on set in the process. “I think that I am good at standing up for myself, but then I’m in situations where I’m like, why didn’t I say anything? And it happens every day,” she says. “It’s so hard to be constantly advocating for yourself, especially as a young actress. You really have to fight for the respect that you deserve. Even the bare minimum respect. I’ve learned a skill of how to stand up for myself while being very concise, and very direct, and not ruffling any feathers.”
Women in the film industry face the unending battle of wanting to be direct, but not so direct that they’re instantly branded a diva. We don’t mention this specifically, but I can imagine any female actor would dread having that “stormed off” rumour attached to their name. “The fear of being a bitch is always in the back of our heads [as women],” says Ferreira. “People are labelled divas all the time. I don’t think I’m even at that level in my career where I can get away with any kind of diva-licious behaviour, but I hope to never have to be a diva, and I don’t think I have that in me. But you know, it’s a thing to be misconstrued a lot.”
Her North Star? “The Cate Blanchetts of the world, the Tilda Swintons and the Gena Rowlands. These are women who are incredibly vulnerable and move you, even if it’s maybe a movie that doesn’t make trillions of dollars in the box office. That’s what I’m interested in.”
‘Bob Trevino Likes It’ is out now
