By: Mia Smiley
Photos by Jonny Marlow
When Daniella Pineda picks up the phone, she’s in motion—literally. Calling in from her car, weaving through Los Angeles traffic, she laughs when told she’s the first interviewee to multitask behind the wheel. “Of course I would be the first,” she says. It’s fitting: Pineda has built a career and a life by refusing to sit still. Actress, writer, budding director, graduate student, and reluctant industry commentator, she is every version of herself: hustling, reflecting, creating, questioning.
Ask her about the weather in LA and she won’t stop at small talk. “Everyone here has been praying for cloudy days and rain,” she admits, before pulling the conversation into climate change. This isn’t a celebrity dabbling in activism for headlines; it’s a deeply rooted concern dating back to college, when she first encountered Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth while working in Senator Joe Lieberman’s office. “My main grievance with society is that climate change and sustainability have become a sort of back-burner perk,” she says. “No, these are imminent issues. Every business, every individual should be consumed by them.”
Her candor doesn’t end with climate. When the subject shifts to politics and free speech, Pineda doesn’t hide behind safe talking points. She cites Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning as one of the most clarifying books she’s ever read. “We’re seeing it in real time,” she says. “They will try to go after everything that they can. And I crave stability, but what we’re getting is disruption and divisiveness.” The comment carries the weariness of someone who once studied journalism in depth and now sees the press as a stage for “high school playground fights.”
That passion for satire explains why Pineda still sees herself as a creator first. “I actually went into this business really only wanting to be a writer, producer, and director,” she explains. “Acting was not something I was pursuing. I thought I would work in independent film, maybe comedy, maybe political satire. And then I just started booking gigs. It kept happening.” A test audition for The Daily Show didn’t land her the job, but it opened doors she never expected. For years, she even resisted calling herself an actor.
That reluctance may explain her careful choices. She doesn’t chase roles just to stay visible. Take her recent work in The Accountant II with Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal. “That one was just a yes. I don’t care what it is,” she recalls. “I was a fan of the first movie, and Gavin O’Connor has such a strong reputation. I thought, ‘I’ll be a tree, I’ll be a bush, I don’t care.’” What she didn’t know was that the film’s emotional weight would rest largely on her character’s shoulders.
Even as acting opportunities arrived, Pineda never put down the pen. She’s written multiple scripts—from a high-level horror film she’s been trying to produce, to a comedy pilot based on her Bay Area upbringing. “I love horror and comedy,” she says. “If you can write one, you can usually write the other. They’re both about timing and tension. But acting pulled me away for a while. I was just trying to understand what I was doing in front of the camera.”
Comedy, in particular, has always tugged at her. Her dream role? Veep. “All those writers are incredible,” she says. “British comedy too—I’m obsessed. Their television and film writing is always the best.” Still, she admits it’s a difficult genre. “Sometimes it’s hard finding things that are actually funny. And just because it’s comedy doesn’t mean I fit into it. I wish I could do more, but you have to find the right projects.”
The industry itself looms large in her story. “It feels like the business is being held together by a thread,” she says. “Entertainment has been overtaken by tech and corporate interests. If you’re only interested in quarterly earnings, you don’t value creative stories or talent the same way. It’s not the same business it was even ten years ago.” The strikes, the mergers, the streaming economy—she doesn’t see them as abstractions but as daily obstacles. “I wish more had come out of the strike,” she adds. “It hurt the business so much, and just as we were trying to take off after Covid, it felt like someone shot at the wings.”
Still, she keeps moving. Next up, she’s headed to Abu Dhabi to film Bunker 13, an action-thriller-horror project with Kate Beckinsale and director Von Stein. At the same time, she’s enrolled in graduate school studying justice and sustainability, and working with Everywhere, a sustainable apparel company she describes as “hardcore” rather than greenwashed. “Most companies just use sustainability as a label,” she says. “This one is really true to form.”
What’s striking is not the sheer volume of projects, but the way Pineda threads them together. Acting isn’t a career ladder for her. It’s a platform, not a prison. Whether she’s on a set, writing a script, or analyzing policy in grad school, she keeps circling back to the same themes: responsibility, truth, and humor as a survival mechanism.
When asked which actor’s career she’d steal for a day, Pineda doesn’t hesitate with this beauty: Julia Louis-Dreyfus. “She’s always in a project where I think, I’d love to do that.” Her favorite fashion era? “Anything from the ’70s. Gen Z has brought back some of the worst parts of early 2000s fashion. Can we just get back to a more classic style?”
Pineda is, by her own description, a morning person who prefers to be asleep by ten, a lover of Alamo Drafthouse screenings, and a fan of “smart horror.” She doesn’t need extravagant trailer demands beyond slippers, a fridge, and a laptop to play movies. Her dogs—Louis and George—often bark in the background, pulling her back to ordinary life.
In the end, what makes Pineda magnetic is not just her résumé, but her refusal to compartmentalize. She doesn’t shed her opinions to play Hollywood’s game. She doesn’t stop writing just because acting pays the bills. She doesn’t treat sustainability as a side hobby but as a second vocation.
And she doesn’t hide her contradictions: a horror-loving comedian, an actress who never wanted to act, a woman equally at home in Silver Lake or upstate New York. “I love the East Coast,” she muses, considering where she might land. “Sometimes I even think about New England. Maybe someday upstate New York. Or maybe Canada, if they’ll let me in.” She chuckles, but beneath it lingers the tension between rootlessness and longing, the same balance she carries in her career. She is always moving toward the next role, the next script, the next degree, the next possibility.
And maybe that’s what defines Daniella Pineda most: not the destination, but the restless, questioning, laughing, and fiercely engaged way she gets there.
CREDITS:
Photographer credit: Jonny Marlow
Hair: Kiki Heitkotter
Makeup: Kindra Mann @ Tomlinson Management Group
Styling: Desiree Morales @ Tomlinson Management Group