Barbie Ferreira Is Chasing Her Indie Dreams

Maxwell RabbWed, April 29, 2026 at 9:09 PM UTC

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Barbie Ferreira Is Chasing Her Indie DreamsEverett

Barbie Ferreira jokes that she “did some damage” on her MacBook’s Photo Booth during the 2010s. Now 29, she lived through indie sleaze as a high schooler—then a pioneering Tumblr It-girl, whose Photo Booth selfies amassed her first following and secured her first modeling gigs. Like many Zillennial teens, she was molded by indie icons on the internet (think Arcade Fire, Mac DeMarco, Grimes), the likes of whom fueled her dream of attending Warped Tour as a “fully fledged human being.”

Mile End Kicks, Chandler Levack’s coming-of-age film set in 2010’s Montreal, gave Ferreira a chance to inhabit that imagined version of herself (in some way, at least). “It feels like a fantasy of what I wish my life was in 2011 in a big way,” she tells me on a video call last week. “It was really touching because I grew up in that era, even though I was pretty young, that was really what molded my brain.”

The role arrives at a moment of change for Ferreira. After splitting from Euphoria following its second season, the actress has moved toward smaller, filmmaker-driven projects, where experimentation is part of the process. Along with Mile End Kicks, Ferreira stars in Daniel Goldhaber’s remake of Faces of Death, also released in April. These two films follow her first indie projects, Tracie Laymon’s Bob Trevino Likes It and House of Spoils, directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy. In more ways than one, Ferreira is chasing an indie dream.

Ferreira grew up in a Brazilian immigrant household in Queens, where she took drama classes at the Boys & Girls Club before relocating to New Jersey. “All I’ve ever wanted was to be an actress, and what brings me the most joy is being able to work on projects that I like and get to challenge myself,” she says. She found her way into acting after modeling for brands—most notably American Apparel. And after starring in a Vice web show, Sam Levinson cast her as Kat Hernandez in Euphoria.

In Mile End Kicks, she plays Grace, a Toronto-born music critic living in Monreal; a character directly drawn from Levack’s life. Grace’s struggle to find herself in a big city felt, to Ferreira (who moved back to New York from New Jersey at 17 to pursue her career), like an incredibly relatable story. “You’re messing up, you’re trying to make your career happen, but you’re just young, and your frontal lobe isn’t fully developed yet, and you’re trying to figure out how to manage dating with your life,” she says.

Dating in Mile End Kicks circles two perfectly crafted caricatures of indie men: Stanley Simons as the misogynist frontman, and Devon Bostick as the hyper-sensitive yet unmotivated guitarist. But what makes Levack’s movie most memorable is how it portrays the difficulties young women faced in the industry at the time, as Grace is dismissed by her industry colleagues—an insufferable, all too familiar boy’s club—and the (perennially dreadful) “men in bands.”

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Still from Faces of Death (2026). Courtesy of Everett.Everett - Everett

“This was pre–Me Too…and not that it’s gotten necessarily much better, but at least there's like language for it, and there’s like more boundaries,” Ferreira says. “In 2011, you think [about] the media—what we were absorbing—[and] how misogynistic it was and how it felt like the boys club, and they were proud of it. Now it’s more sneaky. Subconsciously, we just tend to question women more. We tend not to trust what they say as much. How many times have I said something, and someone has to Google it in front of me. I’m like, ‘I literally am an expert in this’…I love facts, and I check myself. So I’m like, if I say a fact, you best believe it’s real.”

Coming away from Mile End Kicks, Ferreira felt inspired by the Levack's belief in the project. The director made her debut film, I Like Movies, on a $130,000 budget before finally being able to pursue Mile End Kicks, which she had worked on for 10 years, according to Ferreira. It proved that a passion project, no matter how daunting it sounds, “can happen if you really try.” “They’re just going to be on a lower budget, they’re going to take some time, and they’re going to be really hard as fuck to shoot. But it’s going to be worth it!” she says.

A few years ago, Ferreira says she “manifested” a horror movie into her life. She read the script for Faces of Death and quickly signed on to play the lead role, Margot, a content moderator tasked with flagging violent videos online. In April 2023, she found herself filming in New Orleans, temporarily living at the chef of Commander Palace’s (very haunted) house for the shoot. “I’m a creepy bitch, so I like a place that has haunted stuff,” she jokes. The movie reworks the original film’s premise (about a pathologist who studies people as they die) for our time, in which algorithms and technology constantly feed us horrible images. “It’s the algorithm—the violence and the algorithm—all these things that we are continuously being shown all the time,” Ferreira says, telling me that, despite its horrific premise, “it’s a fun watch.”

Ferreira loves to watch movies, perhaps even as much as she loves acting in them. She tells me she that, having not studied film formally, she considers movie-watching her film school. Before Mile End Kicks, she watched Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (I mean, of course) and Bridget Jones’s Diary. As for Faces of Death, she watched David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and the terrifying fake documentary The Poughkeepsie Tapes. But this is just part of her regular routine in Los Angeles, where she’s a regular at the adored Vidiots theater in Eagle Rock, where she recently watched the classic noir Elevator to the Gallows, and AMC Burbank, where she goes to see every new indie film, from Pillion to Sirat.

What Ferreira is looking for in indie cinema is what she says will “really put the stamp on this generation.” She loves “what’s going to be outside the box and what’s going to really stand the test of time,” even if she’s “not saying that necessarily what I’m in is that, but that’s what interests me—these really cool out of the box movies.” At this point in her career, she’s ready to explore films that improve her acting skills rather than simply raise her image.

“I want my career to be in filmmaking for the rest of my life,” Ferreira says. “It’s my passion. These projects have been just such a great tool for becoming a better actress, becoming a better filmmaker; to learn, get to work with people, figure it out, and go in as a student.”

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”