Filming a scene with Channing Tatum and Naomi Ackie for Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice, Liz Caribel Sierra improvised the following line: “I’m from Dyckman, and I lead with so much love, but I’m quick to fuck a motherfucker up.”
Off-screen, 27-year-old Caribel Sierra calls Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood of Dyckman—known as “Little Dominican Republic”—home. It’s where her parents, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic just before she was born, raised her. Playing Blink Twice’s character of Camilla, says Caribel Sierra, was her first experience where “bringing in a little bit of my lived experience as a Latina growing up in New York was actually better for the role.”
Now, acting in an Apple TV+ adaptation of Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 novel, Dope Thief, created by Ridley Scott and Peter Craig, Caribel Sierra once more leans into her heritage. “It was awesome to play a Dominican girl on TV,” she says, referring to her character, Sherry—the girlfriend of one of the show’s two protagonists—but a “very layered experience.” Caribel Sierra describes Sherry’s long acrylic nails, fake eyelashes, and high heels. “She’s confined within this specific version of what a girl is that I had to find a way to love and appreciate [in order] to play her,” she says.
Caribel Sierra, meanwhile, prefers a barefaced look and sneakers. As a child, she didn’t dream of red carpets or designer gowns, but rather chasing a career in STEM, interested in math and engineering.
She attended the Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction for high school—a technical program in Hell’s Kitchen that prepares students for careers in architecture and design. By 18, Caribel Sierra had pivoted again, enrolling in Binghamton University, in upstate New York, with a plan to major in neuroscience.
“I thought that the way to understand human beings was by studying the brain,” she says. During her second semester, however, Caribel Sierra enrolled in an introductory-theater class.
The theater instructor noticed Caribel Sierra’s raw talent and pushed her to audition for the school play, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat. At first, Caribel Sierra was reluctant to shift her focus, thinking, “Dude, I do science. I’m not gonna get onstage.”
But her professor refused to give up. “She forced me to audition,” says Caribel Sierra, who finally relented and landed the lead part of Veronica. “That kind of changed my life.”
Caribel Sierra switched her major to theater soon after. “If this really is my passion, then I’ll do it,” she recalls thinking. “And it’s fine if I do Off Broadway plays for the rest of my life. I just want to be happy.”
It was a decision supported by her family. Caribel Sierra’s mother, who dropped out of college in the Dominican Republic to help pay for her husband’s business degree, was adamant that her daughter should pursue her dream.
“She’s [not] an immigrant mom who’s like, ‘I want to make sure you’re stable, you have to do something safe,’” says Caribel Sierra. “She was like, ‘I just want you to be happy, and I know you’re gonna be successful no matter what. So do it.’”
Caribel Sierra graduated from Binghamton in the spring of 2019—months before the pandemic hit and theaters shuttered, which made it impossible to book acting jobs. Quickly pivoting from the stage to the screen, she spent hours each day filming and submitting audition tapes, including one for Daniel Antebi’s dramedy God’s Time, which would become Caribel Sierra’s first professional part. The film was nominated for Best U.S. Narrative Feature at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, where Caribel Sierra received a Special Jury Mention for Best Performance.
As the pandemic waned, she waited tables at the Midtown cabaret restaurant Green Room 42 between acting jobs, serving wine to Broadway actors such as Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada and dreaming of her big break.
Then, at the end of 2021, Caribel Sierra was cast as Leia in HBO’s The Idol, starring The Weeknd and Lily-Rose Depp. But after three months of filming in Los Angeles, the show’s creators decided to start over with a new script and director. Having already committed to Zoë Kravitz’s buzzy directorial debut, Caribel Sierra turned down the request for a re-shoot, and the role of Leia ultimately went to Rachel Sennott. “I had the champagne problem of picking between HBO and Blink Twice,” says Caribel Sierra with a grin.
Her latest role, in Dope Thief, afforded her a new kind of acting experience. Scott, who produced the series about two small-time scammers who get on the bad side of a powerful drug conglomerate, also directed its first episode. In his signature style, Scott used seven or eight cameras at once to capture a scene in a single take. “There was a sense of a theatrical play with Ridley,” Caribel Sierra says. “It was nice to dip back into what it felt like to play 100 percent and never say cut.”
Though Caribel Sierra brings a sense of comedy to all her characters, drama is her true passion. “One of my long-term dreams is to be in a telenovela,” she admits.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the drama.”
Dope Thief is available for streaming on Apple TV+
Paulina Prosnitz is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
