From lip-synching Britney Spears at a dinner party to starring alongside Zoe Saldaña and Nicole Kidman: Laysla De Oliveira on her acting journey

Laysla De Oliveira should perhaps have known all along that she was going to make her living as a performer: as a youngster she would charge people money to watch her lip-synch Britney Spears songs.

“My mom would have these dinner parties and I would charge her guests, wouldn’t let them in the house unless they paid one or two dollars because it was dinner and a show,” she recalled with a laugh.

Even her grandmother in Brazil would say that young Laysla was going to be an actress, but De Oliveira didn’t start believing it herself until she studied theatre at the former Ryerson University.

“I think I always knew in my heart, but it’s one of those things that can be quite scary because not everybody pursues it,” she said of acting. “I just had to find my journey with it.”

Considering our reason for this talk — De Oliveira’s starring role in a new Taylor Sheridan TV series alongside the likes of Nicole Kidman, Zoe Saldaña and Morgan Freeman — it seems that journey is working out OK.

The show is “Special Ops: Lioness,” coming to Paramount Plus on Sunday, and De Oliveira, 31, stars as a U.S. Marine raider turned undercover operative in a program meant to root out state terrorism before it can develop into another Sept. 11.

She is the “Lioness” of the title, Cruz Manuelos, a young woman from a hardscrabble background who’s recruited by Saldaña’s CIA operative to infiltrate terrorist circles by getting close to the wives and daughters of key players.

De Oliveira described the part as a dream role.

“It was one of the most artistically fulfilling experiences that I’ve had thus far,” she said as we talked at a hotel restaurant in downtown Toronto, her hometown, although she now lives in Los Angeles. (The interview happened before film and TV actors in Hollywood went on strike and pulled the plug on promotional appearances, which affects Canadian actors working on U.S. shows.)

“There aren’t many roles that are written for women that are this gritty. And I love Cruz so much because she is badass onscreen, which is so gritty, and she’s so vulnerable, and playing the range of the two is something that really excited me.”

Of course, part of the attraction of “Lioness” were the people she got to work with: “the greats” De Oliveira called them.

In another interview, this one by Zoom, she recalled getting a phone call from series creator Sheridan after sending in her audition tape; being flown from Toronto to Montana where she read the entire first episode of “Lioness” for Sheridan on the set of his show “Yellowstone”; then flying back to Toronto with no idea if she had booked the part, despite being told she had been excellent.

When Sheridan emailed within days to say, “‘Congratulations on being a lioness’ … my heart just sank to my stomach and I cried like a little baby,” De Oliveira said.

That wasn’t the only part of the experience that made her feel teary.

Getting hugged by Saldaña and told, “I’m so excited to work with you,” was another. “She’s incredibly nurturing and she’s incredibly kind, and I can’t say enough good things about her,” said De Oliveira.

And then there was meeting Kidman, another idol.

“I introduced myself and she said, ‘I know who you are.’ And she had been watching the dailies and she complimented my work, and I think my soul left my body at that moment and the rest is history. Now I call her Nicole, which is crazy.”

Indeed, it’s heady company for someone who’s only been acting about a decade, although De Oliveira had already booked roles beyond the standard one-episode guest spots and TV movies that tend to make up emerging Canadian actors’ resumés.

She played a recurring character on the Netflix series “Locke & Key,” had a lead role in the horror film “In the Tall Grass” and starred in an Atom Egoyan movie, “Guest of Honour.”

It’s not the sort of thing the little girl who grew up watching telenovelas with her Brazilian family would have pictured for herself.

De Oliveira was the only member of her family born in Canada.

She lived with her mom in an apartment over a restaurant while her mother worked as a cleaning lady. When her mom decided to go to school to become a makeup artist, she sent Laysla to live with her biological father, a lawyer, in a small Brazilian town for a year or so. (She also has a stepdad in Toronto who is a drummer and percussionist.) De Oliveira said it was magical because it allowed her to explore nature and play with other kids on the street every night.

But when she returned to Toronto, she also enjoyed going to school with a diverse group of students who were children of immigrants like her.

The one connecting thread between her Canadian and Brazilian lives were the novelas that De Oliveira watched with her family.

“I loved the drama. I loved how people felt so deeply.”

That reverence for the ability to convey emotion would have staying power in De Oliveira’s life, whether expressed through her childhood performances, the fact her favourite modelling jobs (she modelled throughout her teens, including for the Toronto Star) involved some acting, her time at Rosedale Heights School of the Arts or her dream first year at Ryerson (now the Toronto Metropolitan University School of Performance).

It might have taken De Oliveira until then “to be able to say out loud that I was going to be an actress,” but it seems the universe had been trying for a while to point her in the right direction.

Speaking of the universe, it sent her another sign when she was trying to decide whether to stay in university or take an acting job. She chose the job, then the role got cut from the TV show, whose name she can’t remember. But the week she would have headed back to school, she booked another part, a guest spot in the spy series “Covert Affairs,” and her career had begun.

De Oliveira finds it serendipitous now that that very small part, her first screen credit, involved playing another undercover agent.

“I had some good luck in the beginning with roles here and there,” she said.

Not that there weren’t dry spells, including the hours and hours of bartending she did in Toronto to save money to move to L.A. Since she arrived there almost eight years ago she has managed to support herself with just her art, she said.

“I love acting so much. I love pouring my heart out there. I love creating thought and emotion for people. I love helping people escape or helping people relate. But that requires work and I love doing that work. It’s very satisfying to me.”

Playing Cruz in “Lioness,” which shot in Baltimore, Morocco and Majorca, Spain, has been both physically and emotionally taxing. To portray a tough marine, De Oliveira had to learn hand-to-hand combat at an L.A. gym. And then there were weeks on set of daily strength training and weapons training with an ex-Navy SEAL, as well as hours of stunt training.

And on the emotional side, “Cruz goes through a very dark journey and you can’t explore that without going there yourself,” De Oliveira said. “So it did take some time to shed, especially if you’re exploring that for seven months. It is quite dark. But I also thought how beautiful that we get to show that.”

De Oliveira feels a personal connection to the grit and determination Cruz displays; it’s something she’s familiar with having grown up in an immigrant family. “You feel you’ve always got the shorter end of the stick and it’s what you make of it,” she said.

As for what De Oliveira will make of this new opportunity in her career, she’s trying not to project too far into the future.

“I try to just be very present and grateful in the moment because I feel that that’s what works best,” she said.

“This has just been such a dream come true that I could sit in this feeling forever.”

Debra Yeo is an editor and a writer for the Star’s Culture section. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @realityeo

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