Inside Melissa Barrera's Life Before Hollywood Success

Melissa Barrera always knew she was destined for a career in showbiz. Growing up in Monterrey, Mexico, she was well aware of both Broadway and Hollywood, with her hometown only three hours from the Texas border, and a childhood that included both Mexican and American cultures. What it lacked, however, was a clear path to realizing her dreams. "Where I'm from, no one becomes an actor," she shared with Vogue Australia. "It didn't feel like a viable career choice, and a lot of people made me feel like I was crazy for trying to pursue it."

Lucky for us, she went with the crazy, and has successfully built a career bathed in the Hollywood spotlight. Barrera starred as Vanessa in the film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's "In the Heights," played the title role in Benjamin Millepied's "Carmen," and was cast as Sam Carpenter in the "Scream" franchise revival, appearing in both the fifth and sixth installments.

While it may seem like Barrera popped up overnight in a ton of projects, with steady state-side roles from 2018 to 2023, the star has actually been building up her career for years. Before all the Hollywood success, there were reality shows, soap operas, and TV series that led her to where she is today.

Before she was known as an actor, Melissa Barrera confessed her early dreams were more in line with Britney Spears. "I wanted to be a pop star," she told A.Frame about her childhood ambitions. "I would see kids that would go on these reality competition shows that would then get cast in child telenovelas, and then they would do musical telenovelas." In school, she fell in love with the theater department and added acting to her ambitions.

At age 18, she moved to New York to attend the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. While the goal was to do musicals on Broadway, her student visa wouldn't allow her to be cast in anything, so she went back to Mexico, hoping to build up her career and return to New York on an artist visa. Once home, she called on that pop star dream and in 2011 was selected for the popular Mexican reality TV show "La Academia," a singing competition much like "American Idol." It was her first on-screen project.

While she didn't win, she did make it to round 13 out of 18, and her time on the program earned her two things. First, Barrera met her future husband, musician Paco Zazueta, who was also a contestant on "La Academia." Second, her exposure on the series helped her to segue into acting jobs on television.

When her time on "La Academia" came to an end, Melissa Barrera exchanged her microphone for a script. The next year, she appeared in small roles on two different telenovelas, then landed a regular part on "Siempre Tuya Acapulco" for 124 episodes in 2014, and another one, "Tanto Amor," in 2015 for 119 episodes. Grateful for the soap opera experiences, she told Flaunt, "Forty scenes a day, having to go from crying to laughing to being angry — it's like emotional gymnastics. It's great training."

Eager to expand her acting resume, she moved to Los Angeles in 2017, where she landed the role of Lyn in the Starz series "Vida" within a month of her arrival. "'Vida' was kind of crazy because I'd just finished doing a show for Netflix that was really popular in Mexico called 'Club de Cuervos.' I was in the third season of it and it was huge," she explained to Interview about her path to Hollywood. After "Vida," she was cast in several movie roles, including "Scream," a box-office hit that co-starred Jenna Ortega. "It's nice when something that you make with so much love gets received with love," she told People. 

After partially fulfilling her goal of adding an action movie to her resume with "Scream," Barrera would like to re-visit that childhood dream she had before all of her Hollywood success: combining her love of music and acting. "I want to keep doing movie musicals," she confessed to Byrdie.