LAYSLA DE OLIVEIRA IS FASHION’S OCTOBER COVER STAR

When Laysla De Oliveira says, from a spacious New York City hotel room in mid-July, that she’s made it to her “favourite time of year,” she’s not referring to the dog days of summer. She’s assessing her own internal climate, now cooled in light of certain post-bondage freedoms. “I finally get to climb out of all that military gear and step into my real self, my fashionista self,” she tells me, fresh-faced and beaming. The sweat, psychic distress, spent calories and voluntary (or involuntary) tears are all burnt offerings to the play-gods of Hollywood fantasy-making and to everyone who forgets that creating art requires physical labour, too.

De Oliveira, who lives in Los Angeles, is in New York for the season-three premiere of Special Ops: Lioness—Taylor Sheridan’s high-octane death-trap TV series that casts the Canadian as a battered, wayward woman who finds salvation as an undercover CIA operative—and she’s grateful to be trading the heavy drag of American warfare for the glamorous drag of American celebrity. Her fashion choice for the occasion? A suede hooded gown from Gabriela Hearst’s Spring 2026 collection. “The hard part now is to talk about [the new season] without spoiling it,” she says,  and then adds, “I’m really the Tom Holland of the group.”

The hard part earlier, during the six months of the year when the crew filmed the show in Fort Worth, Tex., was twofold: First, there was the metric weight of said military drag (the artillery, vests, combat boots and hard helmets are way heavier than one might expect, especially when you’re running full tilt under the hot Texas sun) and second, the daily three hours of training required to make the many action sequences feel natural and to imbue her character, Cruz, with the elegant, threatening quality of a crouching tiger. “I wasn’t in the gym like that before [this] show,” says De Oliveira. “And then, suddenly, I’m being trained by Navy SEALs.” (She wouldn’t describe them as “tender.”)

If Lioness made handling weapons second nature, an upcoming role has presented a new challenge for the 34-year-old actor. In a rodeo film called Cowboy, musician and music-video director Cameron Duddy’s debut, De Oliveira plays Ben Foster’s ex-girlfriend and baby mama. “I’m used to handling guns,” she says with a laugh. “I was honestly more scared to handle a live baby, [who] might start crying during the energetic, hardcore scenes.”

The training and stunt work for Lioness were no walk in the park, but neither was inhabiting such a traumatized and discarded woman. “I was exploring that every day, and I pushed my body in ways that it wasn’t used to,” she says of her first season. “I didn’t have any time for self-care, so by the end of filming, it felt like I had just given birth and was experiencing postpartum. Everyone was like, ‘How was it?’ and I didn’t know what to say because I was still processing what had happened.”

She was the most depressed she’d ever felt, and she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t the grateful ingenue she was meant to be, with her childhood dreams having been fulfilled. “I never thought I’d work with one Oscar winner, let alone three at the same time, on a show called Lioness, where I play the lioness,” she says. How could she have just worked with Zoe Saldaña (whom she says paved the way for her), Nicole Kidman (whom she had to observe from afar as “exposure therapy” before sharing any scenes) and Morgan Freeman (“Like, I can’t ask for anything else.”) yet still feel, somehow, hollow? “I really had to learn about pacing and self-care and nurturing yourself, because six months is a long time to explore something so emotional—enough time [for it] to get locked into muscle memory.”

De Oliveira now monitors these incursions of her characters into her inner life. Her friends, recognizing her tendency to play psychologically disturbed characters, are now begging her to do a romcom.

In some ways, Cruz’s evolution on the show, from an uncertain young woman to a self-possessed, un-fuck-with-able dangerous one, mirrors the actor’s own professional growth, and after three seasons, De Oliveira can see how Cruz’s confidence has begun to influence her own: “It’s cool to see the ways Cruz has penetrated the script.”

De Oliveira studied dance and drama at Rosedale Heights School of the Arts in Toronto, where she was peers with Canadian photographer Petra Collins, and started modelling when she was just 14—still young enough to be introduced to insecurities she didn’t know were possible. But she says it helped her build a thicker skin for auditions, which, “to be frank, [she] cared much more about.”

Theatre studies at Toronto Metropolitan University provided diminishing returns. “My style is very small and intimate, and I have terrible stage fright,” says De Oliveira. “I’d cry before the performances, and because I’m really not a musical-theatre kid, I would die a thousand deaths whenever we had to sing to each other.” She knew that she preferred performing for a camera, but the university, which admitted just 20 students to the program each year, discouraged external auditions because it felt they might interfere with course attendance. This, she says, is where the pessimistic logic of modelling kicked in. She was accustomed to the process of submitting herself to 500 casting calls and booking one job, so she started auditioning on the side. “I knew that if I finished school at 22 or 23 with zero credits, things would be challenging,” she says.

She booked her first TV role in L.A. around age 20 and, buoyed by the feeling of the universe siding with her, decided to drop out of school. It wasn’t easy. Such decisions don’t bode well for the anxious children of immigrants, who are perennially saddled with the seemingly moral responsibility of converting the sacrifices of their parents into a success they can all be proud of. Her mother had emigrated from Brazil as a cleaning lady, and here was De Oliveira, channelling the high-drama of the tele­novelas they had watched together in her youth into a “secret sauce” for these fictional characters. Then the role got cut. “That wasn’t cute,” she says. It seemed possible, even probable, that she’d abandoned her studies for nothing.

When September rolled around again, though, during the week she would have started her second year, she booked a role that took her to Amsterdam. “Suddenly, I was like, ‘OK, maybe this is what I’m meant to be doing,’” she recalls. More guest roles followed, and even through a two-year dry spell, she built enough self-belief to move to L.A. and bet on herself.

Every Canadian artist eventually confronts the backward logic of their home country’s creative class: You have to leave to seem attractive to the people who stayed, and then they will want to work with you. When she was 26, having settled into her life in L.A., where she was dating her now husband, actor Jonathan Keltz, she landed a starring role in Vincenzo Natali’s In the Tall Grass, the 2019 Canadian adaptation of a Stephen King novella. “I was just a newbie until then, doing guest spots and a bunch of pilots that didn’t go anywhere,” she says. But she felt a big door swing open and saw the light spill in.

"I finally get to climb out of all that military gear and step into my real self, my fashionista self."

When cult filmmaker Atom Egoyan, a darling of the Toronto New Wave, heard that De Oliveira was in town shooting the movie, he reached out. They started meeting every weekend for coffee, and he would bring cut-outs from articles that reminded him of the character he was writing: a young music teacher who willingly goes to jail for a crime she didn’t commit to atone for past sins that she can’t get over. “It’s true that I like to escape into intricate roles that aren’t like me at all,” De Oliveira admits. “But I’m also a Pisces moon, which means I feel very deeply. Maybe I’m drawn to characters that have complicated feelings. Or maybe they’re drawn to me.”

Finally, she read for Egoyan. But when he told her he wanted to give her the main part in Guest of Honour, her reaction confused him. “He was like, ‘You’re the strangest person I’ve ever given a part to—people were begging for this role, and you’re being so casual about it,’” she says. “But I was like, ‘Oh, well, I thought you were going to fire me.’” She’d been recast so many times, and watched so many pilots sink, that she couldn’t believe she’d landed two starring roles. She compares the feeling to being electrocuted but, like, in a good way.

Now, she’s far from those early feelings of uncertainty. It helps, she says, to have an actor for a husband—somebody who can understand the rhythms of her itinerant life and the silence after a bad audition or a hard day on-set. “I don’t think I would suggest that two actors date, because actors can be so into themselves,” she jokes, “but he’s literally been there since my first audition.”

After 14 years together, they keep each other grounded. They do audition tapes together and give each other notes on their respective performances. When, recently, De Oliveira was on a flight and couldn’t get access to a script that had a part for her, Keltz read it for her and then told her all the reasons she needed to take the part. “Sometimes it kind of feels like we’re in a little production company together,” she says. (She did take the part, in a hockey thriller called Good in the Room, directed by Pat Kiely, where she’ll be playing “the Victoria Beckham of Canada, an absolute tornado of a human being.”)

It also helps to now have the full support of her family. “My mom sacrificed everything, and I owe it to us [both] to make my dreams come true,” she says. “I think it’s all about following that inner call and, frankly, not taking no for an answer. People always ask me, ‘What’s your biggest advice [for young artists]?’ I think that when you’re starting out, that’s when you have to believe in yourself the most, because nobody else believes in you at that point. It’s only later, when you start to gain some traction, that everybody is complimenting you—and then you have to think about what’s real and what’s flattery.”

But even when she’s playing make-believe, De Oliveira knows how to keep in touch with what’s real. It’s possible, in the end, to keep two feet on the ground and your head in the sky.

Photography, Nick Merzetti. Publisher, Deidre Marinelli. Creative direction, George Antonopoulos. Styling, Ashley Galang.  Hair, Jerrod Roberts for The Wall Group. Makeup, Leah Darcy for A-Frame Agency. Executive producer, Louie Diaz. Photo assistant, Mickey Hammy. Fashion assistant, Berlin Ventura. Production assistant, Rosario Ochoa. Fashion intern, Jael Valdez.

2026-09-10T15:11:15Z