Sónia Balacó

Sónia Balacó rose to fame in her native Portugal at age 15 by landing a main role in the prime-time TV series “Jornalistas”, and has built herself a career spanning from award winning films and TV series to theatre.

Born in Peniche, Portugal, Sónia soon developed a love for poetry, theatre and acting, deciding at 12 that she was going to be an actress and enrolling in a local theatre group.

Due to her striking looks, she started working as a runway, editorial and commercial model at 14, and was shot by Mario Testino for the cover of L’Uomo Vogue. Around the same time, she landed her first TV role.

Later, she enrolled a BA in Performing Arts at the University of Lisbon. From 2008 to 2012 she lived in London where she studied acting, mastered her accents and worked in fringe theatre and independent films.

In 2011, she starred in the award winning comedy series ‘Último a Sair’, a mock reality show where she played a caricature of herself. Both the show and her performance were hailed by audiences and critics. She went on to play one of the leads in ‘E Depois Matei-o’, TV movie that won the Prix Italia prize for best TV Fiction in 2013, and was a regular on the cult TV series ‘Os Filhos do Rock’.

From 2014 to 2015 she played the main role in the TV series ‘Água de Mar’ and played the lead in the short ‘Freud und Friends’, directed by award-winning director Gabriel Abrantes. The short was in competition at the Berlin Film Festival 2016.

Some of the features Sónia has since been in are ‘Moral Order’ (2020), directed by Mário Barroso and starring Maria de Medeiros, and ‘Amelia’s Children’ (2023), directed by Gabriel Abrantes.

Sónia Balacó’s upcoming work includes the feature films ‘Prisma’, which she also directs, writes and produces, ‘Amo-te Imenso’, which is co-produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures, and the third season of ‘Vikings: Valhalla’ (Netflix).