What Movies and TV Shows Has The Copenhagen Test Star Melissa Barrera Been In?
Find out where you've seen the actress before, from slasher films to a movie adaptation of a hit musical.
Melissa Barrera has a starring role in Peacock's new espionage thriller series, The Copenhagen Test, opposite Simu Liu's brain-hacked U.S. intelligence analyst Alexander Hale.
Alexander discovers that he's become a pawn in a high-tech hostile takeover as hackers have planted a Wi-Fi signal in his brain and they're streaming his every move in real-time. Barrera's Michelle is someone Alexander's agency has hired to pretend to be his love interest in order to keep an eye on him and keep things convincing for whomever is spying through his eyes and ears.
If you've caught some the high-concept thriller show, which is now streaming on Peacock in full, and Barrera looks familiar, there's good reason for that.
Born and raised in northeastern Mexico, Barrera fell in love with performing as a child, acting in school plays and musicals. She later attended New York University Tisch School of the Arts. In 2011, Barrera was a singing contestant in the Mexican reality show La Academia. She didn't win but she went on to be a recording artist as part of the duo Melissa y Sebastian. After some of her songs became radio hits, she acted in several telenovelas, before her career really took off.
Find out more about Barrera's bigger projects and where you may recognize her from, below.
What films and TV shows has Melissa Barrera been in?
Barrera's first major film role was playing Vanessa in Jon M. Chu's 2021 movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's stage musical, In the Heights. For that role, she was nominated for several awards, including in the Best Actress category by the Hollywood Critics Association.
Just a year later, she starred in the much-anticipated big screen revival of the Scream franchise. Barrera was cast as Sam Carpenter, the biological daughter of Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) from the original Scream films. In 2023, Barrera reprised the role for Scream VI.
The actress has found a welcome home in the horror genre, starring in director Lori Evans Taylor's Bed Rest in 2022, the romantic comedy-horror film Your Monster in 2024, and the 2024 horror/comedy Abigail, released in the U.S. by Universal Pictures. Barrera also had a starring role in 2022's Keep Breathing, a limited series that saw her character alone in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash.
Melissa Barrera's early career in reality TV and and telenovelas
Before she began landing roles in big-budget films and TV series, Barrera was known for her parts in Latin American soap operas.
In 2012, Barrera appeared in two Mexican telenovelas, La mujer de Judas and La otra cara del Alma. In 2014, she appeared in a lead role as Olvido Pérez in Siempre tuya Acapulco, which lasted for more than 100 episodes. She followed that up in 2015 with the lead role in Tanto Amor, another telenovela.
Having amassed a dedicated fandom in telenovelas, Barrera kicked off her lead role as Lynda "Lyn" Hernandez in the Starz dramedy Vida in 2018. Over three seasons, she earned great reviews and the eyes of American casting agents.
As for her latest role, if you want to find out if Barrera's Michelle is ultimately a friend or foe to Liu's Alexander Hale in Peacock's The Copenhagen Test, stream the spy thriller series that's exclusively on Peacock right now.
