Jonathan Sim
For two decades, Danay Garcia has been one of the most compelling presences on American television, even when the industry wasn’t entirely sure what to do with her. The Cuban-born actress fled Havana in 2003, was granted political asylum in the United States, and within a few years had landed her first major role as Sofia Lugo on Fox’s global phenomenon Prison Break. Then came seven seasons as the fearless, compassionate Luciana Galvez on AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, 98 episodes in the zombie apocalypse that made her a genre icon and, eventually, a director. Now, with Peacock’s South Florida crime drama M.I.A., in which Garcia plays not one but two roles, the twin sisters Carmen and Leah, she arrives at Emmy season with the most audacious work of her career.
Garcia’s path to this moment is not a straight line. It is, by her own accounting, a story shaped as much by darkness as by breakthroughs. But sit with her long enough, and what emerges is a portrait of an artist who never stopped moving toward the light, even when she couldn’t quite see it.
The connection to storytelling began early, long before Garcia had a name for what she was feeling. “Every child, at some point, someone reads you a story before going to sleep—bedtime stories,” she reflects. “And you just learn so much through characters so early in life. I always felt connected, but not on a conscious level. I never felt like I wanted to be an actress when I was four. It just never happened that way. It naturally started growing in me throughout the years — until I touched the theater. That’s when things changed, big time.”
What the theater gave her was something she would spend the rest of her life chasing: transformation. “I always heard that the arts really transform you, whether it’s music, dance, cinema, theater,” she says. “I love transformation. I love learning. I love going into a place or a role knowing that I’m going to come back different as a human, because I learned so much from that journey. That’s the closest I’ve been to really noticing that I have a different sense of awareness through roles. And I think that’s what stories mean to me. That’s my goal as an artist — to give the audience that kind of different perspective.”
She arrived in this country carrying that perspective with her, along with something the American entertainment industry doesn’t always know how to value: a deep, undecorated reverence for the craft. “Where I come from — Cuba — I was very privileged to see the arts as an art form, as a way of living, not as a decoration,” she says. “It’s really the way to communicate in the culture. It’s full of music. So I came to this country with that kind of connection to the arts and to the craft.” The adjustment was still jarring. English was her second language. The accent was thick. “I would memorize my lines, and then the moment somebody asked me any question, the lines I had memorized would just go away,” she laughs. “Everything was really baby steps from the very beginning.”
The first major turning point came in 2007, when Garcia landed Prison Break — and then watched the rug get pulled out from under her. “I thought it was a huge change in my career,” she says. “And then after I got the show, it was put on hold because of the writers’ strike.” What followed was a decade she calls, without irony, “the ten dark years.” “I got Prison Break in 2007, and then I became a series regular on Fear the Walking Dead in 2017,” she says simply. “During those ten years, I understood what it takes — but it just wasn’t happening.”
The arithmetic of that decade is easy to state and hard to fathom: a decade of auditioning constantly, guest spots on Supernatural, films shot in Venezuela, survival jobs, and the grinding uncertainty of a career that had seemed, for one bright moment, to have arrived. But Garcia doesn’t speak of those years with bitterness. She speaks of them as a crucible. “During those ten years, I really got deep into why I do this, why I love it, and why it’s worth it,” she says. “I quit and I came back. But it was all in this darkness of evolution — year after year.”
What pulled her through was a decisive shift in how she understood her own purpose. “For me, acting became not just ‘what I want to do.’ I didn’t just want to be an actor,” she says. “It was all about: I just want to be a human who loves the arts. And then I started celebrating my friends’ work, learning from them, learning from movies, from things that inspired me.” She went back to class at Ivana Chubbuck Studios, the place where she’d first trained after arriving in the country. She put up scenes weekly. “It wasn’t about ‘I want to be an actor,'” she says. “It was more like: I just want to be an artist, whatever that is.”
That openness cracked something open in her. She started writing. “Through writing, I wasn’t just telling the story of a character — I was creating this whole world,” she says. “I was living all kinds of emotions, and I didn’t know I could do that. I didn’t know I had that in me.” When Fear the Walking Dead finally came in 2016 — ending the drought — she channeled that creative momentum into a short film called Lakura (The Cure), which she co-directed and shot in Mexico immediately after wrapping her first season. It went on to screen at festivals around the world. She also launched a podcast, Treat Your Life Like a Garden, during the pandemic. By the show’s final season, she had proposed something even bolder.
“I thought: if I have learned so much as an actor, I feel like I just want to bet on myself and see if I could direct an episode,” she says. The showrunners agreed, and Garcia joined the Directors Guild of America. The experience, she says, was transformative in ways she hadn’t anticipated. “Working on a show from one perspective, and then all of a sudden, the same story, but you’re on another angle, behind the scenes, working with the crew, the people you love. It was really special and it’s something I want to keep doing.”
Which brings her to M.I.A., and to twin sisters Carmen and Leah — a role that found Garcia in the most unexpected way. She auditioned only for Carmen. The Zoom call to deliver the good news took an unexpected turn. “‘Hey, congratulations — you got Carmen. And Leah,'” she recounts. “And I kept thinking: I’m playing Leah too? Am I hearing this right? And they said, ‘Yes, they’re sisters.’ And I thought, ‘Are they identical twins?’ And they said, ‘Yes.'” The pause that follows in the telling of this story is eloquent. “It was a lot to process — that I got twin sisters. I knew Carmen was going to challenge me, but everything expanded in a crazy way when I found out I was going to play twins and shoot a role I had never auditioned for. I auditioned for Carmen, and it just got doubled.”
She took it one day at a time — the same philosophy that had carried her through the ten dark years. “I focused on Leah,” she says. “I thought: who is this woman? How can I really honor her and her family and the journey we see on the show?”
For Garcia, M.I.A. also represents something larger than a career milestone. Set in Miami, the show arrives at a moment when conversations about Latin representation in television have grown louder and more urgent. “This show is such a great showcase of what the Latin community can do on TV — what we can bring, just fun television, set in Miami, where the culture is celebrated in such an extreme way,” she says. Change has happened, she acknowledges. But she is not ready to declare victory. “There has been change — but there’s a lot of work to do, not just for us, but for everyone.”
Ask Garcia what she hopes people will one day say about her career, and the answer comes quickly, without hesitation. “I love the idea that people feel growth,” she says. “I love growth. I love feeling challenged. I love the people who follow my work feeling surprised by what I’m able to do now that I didn’t know I could do before.” It is, in its way, the same thing she has always been chasing — transformation, for herself and for the audience watching. “I just always want to be in that channel of growth and evolution — through the roles I take and as an artist.”
After twenty years, two iconic television series, a short film, a podcast, a directing credit, and now twin roles in a buzzy Emmy-season drama, Danay Garcia is still becoming. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
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