Aria Mia Loberti (‘All the Light We Cannot See’): ‘I never allowed myself to dream about this’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
Aria Mia Loberti was, by any measure, an incredibly high achiever, particularly for someone legally blind. As a triple major at the University of Rhode Island, she was graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2020. She received a Fulbright Scholarship who earned her master’s degree in the UK. And she was studying for her PhD two years ago at Penn State. Yet she felt unfulfilled. “I was just unhappy, and I didn’t really know why,” she admits. “I’d spent my whole life fighting for my education, and I was literally as far as you could go at the top and doing really well. But I felt like I was living someone else’s life, like I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my life, and I was just kind of going through the motions. I didn’t know what I was good at or what I wanted to do.”
When Loberti, now 29, heard that people were sending in audition tapes to play a blind character in the television adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2014 Anthony Doerr novel “All the Light We Cannot See,” at first she balked, even though she had always harbored the ambition to be an actress. Then she decided to record an audition anyway, all on a first take. “I never thought for a minute I would get it,” she admits. See the exclusive video interview above.
It was the first time Loberti had ever auditioned for anything and had never been cast before. And yet against all odds, she wound up winning the role of the sight-impaired lead character Marie-Laure LeBlanc in the WWII-themed four-part Netflix adaptation that premiered in its entirety on November 2. “It’s amazing, because I never allowed myself to dream about this,” Loberti acknowledges. “I went into the Zoom call with the director, Shawn Levy, thinking I was getting rejected.” Instead, she was told she’d been cast and immediately broke down in disbelieving tears of joy, having landed the part through a global casting search of thousands of contenders. While the character she’s portraying happens to be blind, it’s rare if not unprecedented that an actress with similar sight impairment is cast in the lead of a big-budget production of this scale.
“I never had anybody to look up to,” she stresses. “I (could) never turn on the TV and see someone like me. If I did witness a blind character in a piece, it was portrayed by someone who was sighted, who was putting on the mannerisms of someone who had a sleep shade over their eyes for the first time and would obviously be really nervous and scared. They’d shuffle their feet, and their eyes would be vacant. They wouldn’t know how to make eye contact (and had) this very spaced out vapid expression…And so I feel the weight of that being changed. I also know that people who have never experienced this population before and maybe only going on film representations of it will be very surprised to see that Marie doesn’t look like the stereotype.”
Loberti’s character Marie-Laure is a blind teenager in Nazi-occupied France who meets a young German soldier, Werner Pfennig (Louis Hofmann), who is enlisted by Hitler’s regime to track down illegal radio broadcasts. The tale interweaves the story of their lives. For Loberti, it was all brand new stuff, particularly being on a set with a crew of roughly 300 in Budapest. Her service dog and longtime canine companion, Ingrid, would lead her through blocking. “We shot for 90 days, six-day weeks, 12-plus hour days,” she recalls. I would show up (on the set) at 4:30 in the morning and wouldn’t leave until it was well past dark. I adjusted to that schedule really well. I really thrived on it.”
That said, it was still sometimes intimidating to work with professionals who are all at the top of their field. “I mean, it’s freaking Hugh Laurie, and he’s there, I’m there, and it doesn’t feel like it should be that, it’s just wrong,” she says.
Now – fresh from a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination, announced on Tuesday, for Best Breakthrough Performance in a New Scripted Series – Loberti is trying to imagine a life where she’s both a doctor and an actress. She has one role model in that area: Mayim Bialik. “That gives me a little bit of hope,” she notes, adding that being on film sets “scratch that same itch” for her as being in the world of academia that she’s put on hold for now. “I feel like it’s an important moment for me to really work on my craft, and get better at it, and out myself out there a bit more.”
All four parts of “All the Light We Cannot See” are streaming on Netflix.
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