Sofia Carson knows how to make an entrance. Earlier this year, she descended from the rafters of the Kia Forum, landing onstage to host Netflix’s Tudum 2025, a much-hyped global fan event that streamed live to nearly 200 countries. “Of course that was my first request,” she tells Vanity Fair. “I would like to fly into the Forum, please and thank you. And we made it happen.”
Ten years ago, Carson hadn’t ever been on a feature-film set. Now the 32-year-old is one of the streamer’s most valuable movie stars. Carson got her big break through another corporate behemoth: She played Evie, the blue-haired teenage daughter of the Evil Queen, in Disney Channel’s smash hit Descendants musical movies. Once that trilogy concluded in 2019, she found a home at Netflix—beginning with the 2020 dance dramedy Feel the Beat, which she followed with 2022’s Purple Hearts, in which she played a liberal musician who agrees to marry a conservative soldier (Nicholas Galitzine) in order to get health insurance. That project, on which Carson also served as an executive producer and songwriter, reached number one on Netflix in 82 countries; its soundtrack became the platform’s most streamed on Spotify.
But it was Carson’s role as the endangered girlfriend of Taron Egerton’s TSA agent in the 2024 holiday thriller Carry-On that cemented her place at the streamer. The project currently ranks as Netflix’s second-most-popular English-language film of all time. “That was the moment we all realized that there’s a really special connection going on between myself and Netflix,” says Carson, “and that the films I’m putting out into the world are resonating in a really powerful way.”
This past March, Carson’s magic touch extended to The Life List, in which she starred as an emotionally stunted aspiring teacher who must complete her childhood bucket list before she can receive the inheritance left to her by her mother (Connie Britton). It also became the number one movie in more than 70 countries. The message was clear: whatever Bette Davis was to Warner Bros. during Hollywood’s Golden Age, or whatever Lacey Chabert is to the wholesome Christmas empire of Hallmark, Carson had now become to Netflix.
Hopes are high for her new movie, My Oxford Year, out August 1. Like popular Netflix titles Too Much and Emily in Paris, it follows an upbeat American who gets humbled by the cultural norms of a new country. “You can even think back to What A Girl Wants or Roman Holiday. There’s something so timeless and romantic about diving into another culture, especially British culture, that is really thrilling to a female audience especially,” says Carson. “In My Oxford Year, the romance element is even more heightened because the world she explores is one of literature and poetry, Thoreau and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It’s a really beautiful form of escapism.”
Carson executive-produced the project, working alongside the Temple Hill studio behind other melodramatic literary adaptations like Twilight and The Fault in Our Stars. She stars as Anna De La Vega, a Queens native studying Victorian poetry at the University of Oxford. While there, she falls for teaching assistant Jamie Davenport (Netflix vet Corey Mylchreest), whose complicated family life threatens their blossoming romance.
Carson’s character faces her own struggles, including during a particularly bruising scene in which a drunken pub patron accuses Anna of filling a diversity quota at Oxford. The moment resonated deeply for Carson, whose parents immigrated from Colombia to Florida, raising her in Miami. “Being Hispanic and a young woman raised in the United States, I wanted Anna to be able to reflect that population of young women who are often either underrepresented or wrongly represented on film,” she says. “It has been a very frustrating process to never feel truly identified on film or TV.”
Even before rising in the ranks at Netflix, Carson stood her ground when it came to the type of art she wanted to make. “I remember very early on it was really saddening and frustrating [to see] the roles that I was being offered and the songs that I was being sent to sing,” she says. “They were quite disparaging to women, or disrespectful to women, or painted a really negative stereotype of Hispanic women. And I made a promise to myself early on to never ever—ever—sell myself out for fame.”
Male execs in particular didn’t understand why she was so fastidious. “But it was so crucial to me. And then, as I built respect in the industry, I was able to have a voice. When I came onto Purple Hearts as a producer, as the composer of the soundtrack, and also to star as Cassie—from that moment till now, it’s a beautiful position to be in, to feel that I am respected not only as an artist but as a decision-maker.”
That creative authority hasn’t come without challenges. For all its popularity, Purple Hearts faced backlash from some viewers for its perceived anti-Arab and pro-military viewpoint. Carson defended the film at the time, but admits now that “it was an incredibly important learning experience” for her as an actor-producer. “When you release films that cause a lot of discourse, I think that’s only a good thing. It makes people think and brings up important conversations,” she says. “Our intention was only to showcase this extraordinary young Hispanic woman, the daughter of immigrants who has worked endlessly hard her whole life to survive, and how these two people from different parts of the political spectrum could perhaps communicate with love and kindness. That was always the goal. Most people understood; some people didn’t. And that’s okay. That’s a part of filmmaking. And it’s important to learn and to continue to grow as an artist.”
Carson was a college student majoring in communications and minoring in international relations at UCLA when she auditioned for Descendants, besting then Disney royalty like Zendaya for the role of Evie. “It was, without exaggeration, a fairy tale. Evie changed my life forever,” says Carson. “I remember leaving set on our very last day of the first Descendants film. I was in the car with Wendy Japhet, who was our producer, and I was really sad, because I’m the kind of person who never wants to leave a set. I love being on a movie set, and this being my first one, it was that much more magical. And she said something that today resonates with me so deeply: ‘That’s the beauty of our job, Sofia. That’s the beauty of making movies. It’s going to live on forever.’”
Carson feels the gravity of that statement now more than ever. “Once fame enters your life, you’re kind of shifted forever. I was 21 when I walked onto the set of Descendants,” she says. “I had lived a very normal life. I had had a normal childhood, a normal upbringing. Fame didn’t enter my life when I was a child. So I have witnessed what a different experience that is.”
Carson is grateful to Disney for giving her a professional springboard, and for introducing her to the friends she made by starring in the franchise. Especially Cameron Boyce, the Descendants star who died at age 20 in 2019 due to complications of epilepsy. “He became a brother to me and to my sister. Him and his family took us in like family when we knew nothing about this industry,” says Carson. “He will forever and ever and ever be one of the most extraordinary people that has ever entered my life.”
But Carson also felt pressure to conform to the pop-star path favored by some of her Disney contemporaries, like Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo. She released her debut album in 2022 and is still working on new music—putting emphasis on songs that are “meaningful to me, rather than focusing on, I don’t know, releasing the music that’s cool at the moment or will stream well,” she says.
Carson’s parallel career has given her opportunities to sing with everyone from Andrea Bocelli to Jimin from BTS, as well as the chance to perform onstage at the 2023 Academy Awards. A few years before that event, she says, “one of the most important record executives in this industry held my waist a little too tightly and whispered in my ear that until I started singing more about sex, started wearing less clothing, and [started] cursing more, I would never make it.”
Doing the opposite of that—at the Oscars, no less—“was the most extraordinarily validating experience,” Carson says. “I get emotional just thinking about it. That day will forever be one of my favorite days.”
Between Netflix and her more than 20 million Instagram followers, a lot of eyes are on Carson. But they’re only shown what she wants them to see. “I made it a priority very early on to separate my private life from my public life. So I’ve never discussed my personal life, ever—whether it’s in social media, with the press,” she says. “I think that has led to being able to live a very normal—” Carson stops herself. “Mostly normal existence. It’s shifting a bit, but so far I can live a pretty normal life.”
Separation of church and state is also key to Carson’s success at Netflix. She regularly reviews the data on her films with the streamer’s top brass. “We have our 28-day call, our 90-day call to see how films traveled, which countries gravitated toward them more, and how many people are rewatching them over and over,” says Carson. “It’s extraordinary to have access to all of that, but I guess that’s the balance between being an artist and being a producer. To be an artist, you kind of have to separate yourself from so much of that to be able to do your job well. But then to be a producer, all of this is crucial information.”
Who is the audience for a Sofia Carson film, and what are they looking for? “I could give you the statistical answers to that, but I never approach a project in that way,” she says. She will note that her reach traverses age—“The people who come up to me for a photo, they will range from someone who’s 10 to someone who’s a mother”—and gender, with Carry-On and Purple Hearts netting sizable shares of both male and female viewers. “I always choose my projects based on making sure that it is true to who I am and to the stories that I want to tell,” Carson says. “We also live in a world where there’s such darkness, so releasing something that can provide light or escapism has been crucial in my career.”
Outside of Carry-On, Carson’s Netflix films have an optimistic tilt to them. But she has her sights set on edgier fare. “I remember watching Charlize Theron in Monster and Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted. I don’t know if I want to go that dark, but seeing these women go to those depths and challenge themselves as performers is really exciting,” she says. “And I would love to be able to do something like that.”
Carson’s next project is Last Night at the Lobster, a dramedy costarring Elisabeth Moss and Brian Tyree Henry that marks Narcos star Wagner Moura’s English-language directorial debut. “I met with Wagner almost two years ago, and I just was so immediately drawn to this story. It’s so beautiful in its simplicity, and the cast is extraordinary.” She can’t divulge just yet whether the film will land at Netflix—but adds, “I’m really looking forward to being a sponge and absorbing as much as I can from these extraordinary artists.”
It’s common to wonder, in the streaming age, where all the movie stars have gone. But Carson’s sheer presence seems to ensure a film’s success on Netflix—making her perhaps the first true streaming movie star. “I don’t really think about it like that,” says Carson. “We’ve grown up in a world where movies are released either at the theater or on streamers, and both feel equally important to us. The greatest actors in the world are doing films on streamers as well as theatrically. So I just think the world has shifted in a really quick but powerful way. And I feel really lucky that my films are resonating. To hear you say that people watch a movie because I’m in it is, I don’t know, perhaps even beyond my wildest dreams.”
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