Malina Pauli Weissman

Malina Pauli Weissman (born March 12, 2003) is an American actress whose career has been built almost entirely on television, and who has spent the last two years methodically dismantling the thing that made her famous. She arrived as a child performer with an unusual specialty: playing the younger version of someone else. Young April O’Neil to Megan Fox in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, young Kara Zor-El to Melissa Benoist in Supergirl. Those roles are footnotes in other people’s stories, and she outgrew them fast.

The part that made her was Violet Baudelaire, the eldest of three orphans in Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which she carried across 25 episodes and three seasons opposite Neil Patrick Harris. Violet is an inventor who ties her hair back with a ribbon when she is about to solve something, and Weissman played her with a watchfulness that never tipped into precocity. Since then she has moved deliberately toward horror and genre work, taking the sardonic Grace in Joseph Kahn’s Ick, the slasher lead in The Hermit, and a role in the unreleased Slay. Kahn cast her first, before anyone else in the film, on the strength of an audition in which she refused to play the comedy as comedy.

Her 2026 is the test of whether that transition lands. On October 1 she headlines Coven Academy, a New Orleans-set supernatural series from High School Musical: The Musical: The Series creator Tim Federle, playing Briar, a New York teenager who discovers she is a witch. It is her first leading television role since Violet, it moved networks between announcement and premiere, and it arrives with a release format Disney is openly experimenting with. She is 23, she has one awards nomination to her name, and the interesting part of her career is plainly still in front of her.

People also read: Neil Patrick Harris (Count Olaf), Melissa Benoist (Supergirl), Jenna Ortega (Wednesday), Mena Suvari (American Beauty)

Quick Facts

Trailer Video

Video courtesy of Freeform’s official YouTube channel.

Featured Video

Video courtesy of Netflix via YouTube.

Early Life & Education

Weissman was born in New York City on March 12, 2003, and grew up there, which turns out to matter more than the usual biographical throat-clearing: nearly everything about her early career ran through the city’s fashion and commercial infrastructure rather than through Los Angeles. Her mother is a working model of German and Palestinian background, her father is American, and the household was multilingual enough that Weissman came out of it fluent in English, German, and Spanish. Her older sister, born on the same date three years earlier, records as the indie pop artist Ayla D’Lyla.

She signed with a New York modeling agency at eight, following her mother into the business, and spent the next several years in front of stills cameras for Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s, Benetton, DKNY, and H&M, with commercial work for ACT, Maybelline, Purell, and My Little Pony alongside it. This is a less glamorous apprenticeship than it sounds and a more useful one than it looks. A child who has done that volume of commercial work arrives on a film set already comfortable with lights, marks, repetition, and adults asking for the same thing forty times. Her screen debut in 2014, at eleven, was a handful of scenes in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Her education stayed in the city too. She attended a professional performing arts high school and went on to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, studying in the Collaborative Arts program rather than the conservatory acting track, and presenting a capstone project in May 2025. That choice reads as consistent with what she has said about her ambitions: she has talked in interviews since her teens about wanting to direct. She is a SAG-AFTRA member.

Career Highlights and Milestones

Weissman’s first two credits gave her an odd early specialty. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) she played April O’Neil as a girl, filling in the backstory for Megan Fox’s adult version. A year later she did the same job in the Supergirl pilot, playing Kara Zor-El as a child to Melissa Benoist’s grown Kara, a role she returned to across the show’s first seasons. Both parts are structurally thankless: you exist to explain someone else. She has since described the Supergirl work warmly, largely because it involved a flying harness and she was about ten.

The breakout came through a director who already knew her. Barry Sonnenfeld cast her as Rebecca Brand in the 2016 comedy Nine Lives, opposite Jennifer Garner and Christopher Walken, in a film that took a critical beating and still grossed roughly $57 million worldwide. Sonnenfeld then brought her to A Series of Unfortunate Events, reportedly because he had seen her deliver dense dialogue quickly without overplaying it. That is exactly the register Violet Baudelaire requires. From 2017 to 2019 she anchored the Netflix adaptation across three seasons and 25 episodes, opposite Neil Patrick Harris’s Count Olaf and Patrick Warburton’s Lemony Snicket, in a show built on fourth-wall breaks and arch narration that could easily have swallowed a less grounded lead. Violet is the Baudelaire who builds the way out, and Weissman played her as competent rather than plucky, which is the harder and better choice.

Then she largely disappeared, which is the part of the story most profiles skip. Between the Unfortunate Events finale in 2019 and her return in 2024 she logged one episode of Evil and an appearance in her sister’s music video, and otherwise went to university. Child performers who step away at sixteen frequently do not step back; the ones who do usually have to prove something. Her proof was Ick (2024), Joseph Kahn’s aggressively fast horror comedy, in which she plays Grace, a teenager who notices the town is being consumed by an alien growth roughly a decade before anyone else does. Kahn has said she was the first person he cast in the entire film, and that what separated her audition was that she played it completely straight while everyone else reached for the joke. Critics broadly agreed she was the film’s emotional anchor even where they disagreed about the film. Ick premiered at TIFF in September 2024 and got a small Fathom Events theatrical run the following July.

She has stayed in genre since, taking the lead in the low-budget slasher The Hermit opposite Lou Ferrigno and shooting the horror dramedy Slay for first-time narrative director Kyra Elise Gardner. Neither is a prestige play, and The Hermit in particular drew poor reviews. But both are working actor decisions, and they set up the swing that actually matters: Coven Academy, premiering October 1, 2026, in which she leads a Disney supernatural series as Briar, a New Yorker who learns she is a witch. Created by Tim Federle, told across 21 short chapters, and moved from Disney Channel to Freeform between the 2025 casting announcement and the 2026 premiere, it is a bigger bet on her than anything she has carried since Violet.

Selected film and TV highlights

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)
• Difficult People (2015 to 2016)
• Supergirl (2015 to 2017)
• Thirsty (2016)
• Nine Lives (2016)
• A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017 to 2019)
• Evil (2022)
• Ick (2024 TIFF premiere; 2025 US theatrical)
• The Hermit (2025)
• Coven Academy (2026)
• Slay (in post-production)

Major recognition

• Young Artist Award nomination for Best Ensemble Performance in a Streaming Series or Film (2019), shared with A Series of Unfortunate Events castmates Louis Hynes and Presley Smith. This remains her only individual awards-body recognition to date.
• Lead billing on A Series of Unfortunate Events, a series that won the Online Film & Television Association’s Best Children’s Program award in 2019 and drew multiple craft nominations across its run. These are series-level honors rather than personal ones.
• Cast first, ahead of the entire ensemble, in Ick by director Joseph Kahn, who has publicly credited her audition’s straight-faced naturalism as the deciding factor.
• Top-of-call-sheet billing on Coven Academy (2026), her first leading television role in seven years.

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Awards and Accolades

Filmography / Notable Works

Net Worth, Income, & Lifestyle

Social Media & Online Presence

Fan communities on social media (unofficial)

NOTE: In addition to any official accounts listed above, many fan-run pages and clip accounts exist across platforms. These are not confirmed to be affiliated with Malina Pauli Weissman. Links and usernames can change at any time.

Trivia & Lesser-Known Facts

• Joseph Kahn cast her before anyone else in Ick, including Brandon Routh and Mena Suvari. He has said the other auditioning actors played for laughs and she did not, which is precisely why she got it.
• She and her older sister share a birthday exactly three years apart, both born on March 12. Her sister records as the indie pop artist Ayla D’Lyla, and Weissman appeared in the video for the 2022 single “Money.”
• She is fluent in English, German, and Spanish.
• Her modeling career started at eight, following her mother into the business, and ran through Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s, Benetton, DKNY, and H&M before she had a single screen credit.
• She has talked about wanting to direct since she was a teenager, and chose NYU Tisch’s Collaborative Arts program over a straight conservatory acting track.
• On Supergirl she was put in a flying harness at around ten years old, which she has described as the genuinely formative part of the experience.

Quotes

“I don’t think Grace thought she was being funny.”

– Malina Pauli Weissman, Collider, TIFF 2024 (September 2024)

“It’s about monsters we live with in our life, like fear, denial.”

– Malina Pauli Weissman, on what the Ick represents, FearHQ (July 2025)

“I love to paint and draw and just make art on my free time.”

– Malina Pauli Weissman, Refinery29 (January 2017)

“Violet is such a role model in so many ways.”

– Malina Pauli Weissman, PIBE Magazine

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: How old is Malina Pauli Weissman?
A: She is 23. She was born on March 12, 2003, in New York City.

Q: What is Malina Pauli Weissman best known for?
A: Playing Violet Baudelaire, the eldest Baudelaire orphan, across all three seasons of Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Before that she was known for playing the child versions of April O’Neil in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Kara Zor-El in Supergirl.

Q: Has Malina Pauli Weissman won an Oscar?
A: No. Her only awards-body recognition to date is a 2019 Young Artist Award nomination for Best Ensemble Performance, shared with her A Series of Unfortunate Events castmates. She has not been nominated for an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy, or a Golden Globe.

Q: Where is Malina Pauli Weissman from?
A: New York City, where she was born, raised, educated, and began working as a child model at eight.

Q: Is Malina Pauli Weissman married?
A: There is no public confirmation of a marriage or a current relationship. She keeps her personal life private and has not commented on it publicly.

Q: What is Malina Pauli Weissman in next?
A: Coven Academy, premiering October 1, 2026, on Freeform, with the full season arriving October 2 on Disney+, Hulu, and Freeform on Demand. She plays Briar, the lead. The horror dramedy Slay is also in post-production with no announced release date.

Upcoming Projects

• Coven Academy (October 1, 2026) – Confirmed and dated. Weissman leads as Briar in Tim Federle’s New Orleans-set supernatural series. It premieres on Freeform at 8 p.m. ET, with all 21 chapters arriving the next day on Disney+, Hulu, and Freeform on Demand. Freeform then airs the season in three weekly blocks. The series was originally announced for Disney Channel and Disney+ in August 2025 and moved networks before premiere, so treat any further scheduling detail as subject to change until officially confirmed.
• Slay (TBA) – In post-production. A horror dramedy following seven high school seniors, marking the narrative feature directing debut of Kyra Elise Gardner and the feature writing debut of actor Jimmi Simpson, from a story by Zoey Luna. Weissman plays Kat alongside Luna, Aya Cash, Shawnee Smith, and Sean Giambrone. Filming wrapped in 2025; no distributor or release date has been announced, and timing can shift.
• Coven Academy, further seasons (unconfirmed) – No renewal has been announced as of August 2026. Any reporting of a second season should be treated as unconfirmed until Disney or Freeform says so.

Interviews & Features

• Collider, “Joseph Kahn Discusses How He Combined The Blob, blink-182 and Brandon Routh Into ‘Ick'” (2024), the TIFF roundtable where Kahn explains on the record why he cast her first and what her audition did differently.
• FearHQ, “ICK Exclusive Interview With Malina Weissman” (2025), a full transcript covering her approach to Grace, green-screen acting, and her Supergirl memories.
• Refinery29, “Malina Weissman Will Make You Fall In Love With Violet Baudelaire All Over Again” (2017), the launch-window profile that catches her at thirteen and takes her seriously.
• Coveteur, “A Series of Unfortunate Events’ Malina Weissman on Acting and Fashion” (2018), a season three-era conversation that doubles as a snapshot of her New York fashion-world upbringing.
• PIBE Magazine, “Interview With Actress Malina Weissman”, a short but useful piece in which she names directing as her long-term goal.

Public Appearances & Festivals

• Toronto International Film Festival (September 7, 2024): Weissman walked the world premiere of Ick in Toronto alongside Joseph Kahn, Brandon Routh, and Mena Suvari, and sat for the festival’s press roundtables. The portrait session she did there produced the freely licensed photographs now used across her coverage.
• Variety Power of Young Hollywood (August 5, 2026): She appeared in Los Angeles at the Four Seasons Hotel at Beverly Hills with the Coven Academy cast, including Malachi Barton, who was honored that night with the Rising Star Award.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events season two premiere (March 29, 2018): She attended the Netflix premiere in New York, one of a run of hometown press appearances across the show’s three-season lifespan.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events launch screening (January 11, 2017): Her first major red carpet as a series lead, at AMC Lincoln Square in New York, days before the show’s Netflix debut.
• Coven Academy press cycle (August 2026): The first-look teaser and cast photography rolled out on August 13 ahead of the October premiere, putting Weissman back into an active press cycle for the first time since the Ick theatrical run.