Matilda De Angelis is at her best when she is being looked at and knows it: still, unembarrassed, waiting to see what the other person will do. Television found that in her early; the films have so far given her less to do with it.
Fi1m perspective
In the first hour of The Undoing (2020), Elena Alves walks into a meeting of a school auction committee, sits down and feeds her baby while the other women decide how to feel about it. De Angelis plays her as somebody who has not come for the auction. She has come to look at Grace, and she does, without apology, in a gym changing room, in a lift, across rooms that Anthony Dod Mantle shoots through glass so that nobody is quite sure who is watching whom. It made our skin prickle, and the reason is that De Angelis does almost nothing. She lets the other actors carry the unease and refuses to be embarrassed on their behalf.
It was her first big part outside Italy, and the career before it had been quick. She was in a band, Rumba de Bodas, and had no acting training when Matteo Rovere cast her, at 20, as the lead in Italian Race (2016). Italian films and television followed, then Susanne Bier's series, then a run of large international productions: The Law According to Lidia Poët (2023), Citadel: Diana (2024) and Luc Besson's Dracula (2025), with Italian features such as Rose Island (2020), Robbing Mussolini (2022), Fuori (2025) and Siblings (2025) in between.
The pattern in what we have seen says more about the people casting her than about her. The Undoing gives her one note, as it gives everyone, but it is a strong one and she holds it; the series is most alive when she is in the frame and goes slack once she has left it. In Dracula she is Maria, one of several people handed scenes rather than a character, and she is the only member of the cast who appears to be enjoying herself. That is not nothing in a film that never once frightens, but it is not a part either. The roles that come her way seem to ask for quick changes of mood and a good deal of physical effort. The role that trusted her to sit still and be looked at, which is the rarer thing, has come once.
She has said of choosing work, "I need to fall in love with something—whether it’s a flaw or a virtue, I have to fall in love." On the evidence of Elena Alves, what she falls for is the flaw, and she does not soften it. What she needs is a director who will hold the camera on her and wait. Bier did it for an hour, and it is the hour of that series we would send anyone to. The Italian films are where the reputation was made and we have not caught up with them; we would like to see Rose Island before the big international productions finish deciding what she is for.
Biography
Matilda De Angelis is an Italian actress and singer. She was born on 11 September 1995 in Bologna and attended the liceo scientifico Enrico Fermi there. She began studying guitar and violin at the age of eleven and started composing songs at thirteen. In 2011 she joined the band Rumba de Bodas as a singer; the group released the album Karnaval Fou in 2014.
De Angelis made her film debut in Italian Race (2016) as Giulia De Martino. Subsequent roles include The Prize (2017), Youtopia (2018), Rose Island (2020) as Gabriella, and Robbing Mussolini (2022). On television she has appeared in Leonardo (2021) as Caterina da Cremona, the HBO miniseries The Undoing (2020) as Elena Alves, The Law According to Lidia Poët (2023–2026) as Lidia Poët, and Citadel: Diana (2024) as Diana Cavalieri. She is also known for the film Dracula (2025).
