One lead performance is not a career, but Maya da Costa's Coley in Girls Like Girls is a real piece of acting: a girl who has taught herself to take up no room, and what happens to her when she starts wanting to.
Fi1m perspective
Watch how she stands. In Girls Like Girls (2026) Coley comes into a room with her arms folded and her eyes on the floor, and da Costa holds that posture so steadily that when it changes we notice before Coley does. It changes when Myra Molloy's Sonya walks in. That is the whole performance in a sentence, and da Costa spends 95 minutes declining to hurry it.
There is not much career yet to describe, and we will not pretend otherwise. She began in television, with a recurring part as Maya Longette in the miniseries Under the Bridge (2024), and Hayley Kiyoko's film is her first feature and her first lead. We scored it 67: tender, well acted, and timid whenever it could have gone somewhere harder. Da Costa is the reason the number is not lower. She trained as a dancer as well as an actor, and it shows in how much of Coley is told by the body rather than the lines: the shoulders, the hands, the angle of a chin when Sonya says something she was not supposed to hear.
The scene we keep going back to comes late at night, after the others have gone. Sonya asks Coley something ordinary, Coley cannot answer, and da Costa lets us watch her decide not to. It moved us more than a film this careful had any right to, because of what was on her face: a girl who has spent a year being sad and has just noticed she is frightened instead. Da Costa has described the part better than we can. "Coley has so much going on, and she doesn't speak that much, but when she does, it is exactly what she needs to say." That is accurate, and it is rarer than it sounds for an actor to know what they are doing.
What we do not know is what she does with a part that is not built for stillness. Coley withholds, and da Costa is good at withholding. Molloy has the noisier job, playing a girl putting on a show for her friends and for a boyfriend, and it is Molloy's pretending that gives da Costa's watching something to look at. Whether da Costa can carry a scene that asks her to talk fast, or be foolish, or fill a room instead of shrinking from it, we have not seen. She has been cast in Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning (2026), which will settle the talking question, and in the next Paranormal Activity film (2027), which will settle a different one.
Biography
Maya da Costa is a Canadian actor and dancer of Portuguese and Vietnamese descent, based in Vancouver. She had a recurring role as Maya Longette in the 2024 Hulu miniseries Under the Bridge and stars as Coley in the 2026 film Girls Like Girls, directed by Hayley Kiyoko.
Da Costa trained in acting from the age of 12 and in multiple dance styles, completing Harbour Dance Centre’s Intensive Training Program in 2024. Her other credits include Descendants: Wicked Wonderland (2026) and The Healing Powers of Dude.
