Aria Mia Loberti never intended to be an actor. Until last year, the 29-year-old was pursuing a carefully plotted career in academia. In 2020, Loberti graduated summa cum laude from the University of Rhode Island with a triple major in communication studies, political science, and philosophy. She was awarded a prestigious Fulbright scholarship and spent a year in London completing a master’s in rhetoric at Royal Holloway. In 2021, she was accepted into a Ph.D. program at Penn State, where she intended to explore the works of Plato, the reception of ancient women’s voices, and the role of the supernatural in ancient literature.
Her résumé, which includes a TEDx Talk with views into the thousands and volunteer positions with the United Nations and UNICEF, is of a polymath you would expect to quickly land a tenured teaching position.
But a few months into writing her dissertation, Loberti received an e-mail from a professor that sent her life on an entirely different track. It was an open call for auditions to play Marie-Laure in All the Light We Cannot See, Netflix’s four-episode adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Like the character, Loberti is blind.
Set in occupied France during World War II, the series follows Marie-Laure, an amateur radio presenter, and Werner (Louis Hofmann), a young German radio engineer who is drafted into a Nazi Wehrmacht squad to trace a radio signal broadcasting messages of resistance. The show, which also stars Mark Ruffalo, is epic in both scope and scale.
Before this role, Loberti had never acted before. “I don’t have a person who I can look up to and say, ‘Oh, they’ve done this before,’” she says of the absence of actors who are blind. “I don’t have another actor who’s blazed this trail.”
Nevertheless, she recorded an audition tape and sent it off. The show’s director, Shawn Levy, a producer on Stranger Things and the director of Free Guy, immediately noticed something about Loberti, whom he describes as a “miracle” in interviews. Out of the thousands of actresses from around the world who submitted videos, she was the clear choice.
Despite never having performed onstage or in front of a camera, Loberti found acting came naturally. “In order to be an actor, you need to be a human being first,” she says. “That means you need to suffer. You need to laugh. You need to grow and change and evolve, and you need to put yourself out there in the world.”
“I don’t have a person who I can look up to and say, ‘Oh, they’ve done this before.’”
Loberti has endured all that. She grew up in Rhode Island, and at school was “verbally harassed by teachers” and bullied by her peers. “My classmates were taught to hate the fact that I was different” and were taught “that it was O.K. to pick on me, that it was O.K. to hit me with a ruler, it was O.K. to shout a slur at me.” As a result, Loberti was home-schooled from third grade until she left for college.
Since shooting All the Light We Cannot See, Loberti has pressed Pause on her Ph.D. to pursue her film career. She’s completed another feature-length project, but she can’t yet reveal the details.
For Loberti, success isn’t just about her; it has a greater meaning. “I hope that the door is open now for the next little girl.”
All the Light We Cannot See will be available for streaming on Netflix beginning November 2
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Bridget Arsenault is the London Editor at AIR MAIL