Two films, one year, and a face you do not forget. In the first, she watches the tape so her boyfriend does not have to die from it. In the second, she is left for dead in the desert and walks back down the mountain with a rifle and a grudge. Matilda Lutz is the Milan-born actor who led Rings as Julia and Revenge as Jen before taking the title role in Red Sonja.
That would be enough of a résumé for most people. Lutz also had a whole Italian career running before, during and after those two films — prime-time TV, a Muccino drama, a Netflix horror film shot in her own language, a period series about a real woman who took to the hills with a rifle — and she moves between Italian, English and French sets as if the border were a suggestion. Put it together and you get one of the more interesting horror careers of the last decade.
Quick Specs
- Full name: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz
- Born: 28 January 1992, Milan, Italy
- Occupation: Actor, model
- Known for: Julia in Rings (2017), Jen in Revenge (2017), the title role in Red Sonja (2025)
- Years active: 2011–present
Born in Milan, raised in fashion
Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz was born in Milan on 28 January 1992. Her birth year is reported as both 1991 and 1992.
Fashion was the family business on both sides. Her father, Elliston Lutz, is an American fashion photographer; her mother, Maria Licci, is an Italian model. Lutz modelled for fashion and beauty brands from a young age, and an older brother, Martin, would later play a quiet part in the career that followed — but in the beginning, the camera was something she stood in front of for other people’s clothes.
A shy model, a psychology student
The acting started as therapy of a kind. Lutz has described herself as painfully shy — frightened of standing up in front of a class even for an oral test — and after finishing secondary school in Milan she went to New York, took small jobs and signed up for acting, dance and singing classes. On stage, she has said, she felt free, because nobody was judging Matilda; they were watching a character.
Then she went home and did the sensible Italian thing. She enrolled in psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan and kept acting on the side, training in workshops with the Milan acting coach Michael Rodgers. Her brother Martin had moved to Los Angeles and kept telling her to visit. She visited. She stayed. The psychology course was left behind, and the plan B quietly became the only plan.
The Italian years
The first screen work came in Italy. She played a single episode of the cop series Crossing Lines (2013) and appeared in Giovanni Veronesi’s The Fifth Wheel (2013), but the role that made Italian viewers know her face was Barbara Pinaider in the Rai school series Fuoriclasse (2014–15). Federico Micali’s L’Universale (2016) followed, and then Gabriele Muccino cast her as Maria in Summertime (2016), a road-trip drama that played the 73rd Venice Film Festival. By the end of 2015, with that work in the can and a Hollywood horror film on the way, she was being introduced to the American industry as an Italian actor to watch — one who could switch to French or English without missing a beat.
Rings: the American tape
The breakthrough was a cursed videotape. In Rings (2017), Lutz plays Julia — an original character written for this film, not Naomi Watts’s Rachel Keller recast in a younger face. Her boyfriend Holt (Alex Roe) falls in with a college experiment in passing the tape along, run by Professor Gabriel Brown (Johnny Galecki), and Julia takes his place in the chain. Vincent D’Onofrio plays the blind man at the end of Samara’s buried past, and Bonnie Morgan wears the wet hair as Samara herself.
Rings is the third film in the American Ring series, following the 2002 remake and The Ring Two. F. Javier Gutiérrez directed, from a screenplay by David Loucka, Jacob Aaron Estes and Akiva Goldsman that draws on elements of Kōji Suzuki’s novel Spiral — start with Kōji Suzuki if you want the curse at its origin. The film was shot in 2015 and then sat on the shelf through a string of release-date moves before Paramount finally opened it in the US on 3 February 2017. It runs 102 minutes and is rated PG-13. Critics were brutal; audiences were not. On a $25 million budget it took about $83 million worldwide.
One line worth drawing clearly: Julia’s ghost is Samara Morgan, and Samara belongs to the American films. The Japanese series runs on a different ghost — Sadako Yamamura — in a different continuity. If you want that line, start with Ringu. Lutz has no part in the Japanese story.
Revenge: Toronto first, Sundance second
If Rings made her visible, Revenge made her undeniable. Coralie Fargeat’s feature debut casts Lutz as Jen, the young mistress who arrives at a remote desert villa with her rich, married boyfriend Richard (Kevin Janssens) for a quiet weekend — until his hunting partners, Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède), turn up early. What follows is a rape-revenge film that makes the genre’s machinery visible while it runs: the assault is ugly, the survival is earned, and the third act is a sun-blasted nightmare she walks through soaked in blood and sheer refusal to stay dead. No apology is asked for. None is given.
She very nearly was not in it. As Lutz tells it, Fargeat auditioned her in Los Angeles — once in a hotel room at six in the morning, then five or six more times, in a wig, dancing to music, building the character — and then phoned to say she had not got the part. Two other actors were cast ahead of her, and both walked away from a role that frightened them. When the call finally came, it came on a Friday. By Saturday she was on a plane to Paris.
Get the festival order right, because it is easy to reverse. The world premiere was the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness programme in September 2017 — the screening where paramedics had to be called to help an audience member, which tells you everything about the room’s temperature. Shudder had already bought the film before Toronto. Sundance came second, in the festival’s Midnight section in January 2018, where Neon came aboard for the theatrical release. Revenge reached US cinemas and on-demand on 11 May 2018. The box office was small; the reputation was not. Revenge became one of the most-discussed genre debuts of its year, and the film that made Fargeat a name long before The Substance.
Medici, motherhood and the next chapter
In 2018 Lutz joined the second season of Medici as Simonetta Vespucci, the Florentine noblewoman long linked with Botticelli’s Venus — a costume-drama turn released the same autumn Revenge opened in Italy. That year she was also expecting her first child with the actor Antonio Folletto, whom she had married; their son, Oliver Antonio, was born on 13 September 2018.
The French miniseries They Were Ten (2020), an Agatha Christie update, kept her working in a third language, and the science-fiction thriller Zone 414 (2021) kept her in English.
A Classic Horror Story: home turf, darker
In 2021 she headlined horror in her own language. A Classic Horror Story, directed by Roberto De Feo and Paolo Strippoli and released on Netflix on 14 July 2021, casts her as Elisa, a young woman carpooling south in a camper van with strangers when the trip crashes into the woods and strands them beside a ritual site. It is a film that knows exactly what you think it is, and enjoys being something else — a backwoods horror that keeps turning its own clichés inside out until the last scene turns the camera on the audience.
Cannes, Reptile and Brigands
The early 2020s kept her moving between languages and genres. Michel Hazanavicius cast her in Final Cut (2022), his zombie comedy that opened the Cannes Film Festival that year. Grant Singer’s crime thriller Reptile (2023) put her opposite Benicio del Toro and Justin Timberlake. Magpie (2024), directed by Sam Yates, set her against Daisy Ridley in a domestic thriller about jealousy and a film shoot.
Then came the role that took her back to Italian history. In the Netflix series Brigands: The Quest for Gold, released on 23 April 2024, Lutz plays Michelina Di Cesare — a real nineteenth-century brigantessa of southern Italy, a woman who fought with the bands that resisted the new Italian state after unification. Lutz has spoken about the role as a way of telling the story of southern women who fought for their freedom, and you can see why the part landed with her: it is a western in all but name, with a heroine carrying a rifle up a mountain. Sound familiar?
Red Sonja: the replacement who took the sword
The 2025 chapter starts with somebody else’s name on the call sheet. Red Sonja — the she-devil with a sword, born in Robert E. Howard’s pulp world and made famous by comics — was first cast with Hannah John-Kamen. When that version fell apart, M. J. Bassett took over as director, and in August 2022, as cameras rolled at Nu Boyana Studios in Sofia, Bulgaria, the title role was announced as Lutz’s. Wallis Day plays Annisia, Robert Sheehan plays Draygan, and the company includes Michael Bisping, Martyn Ford and Eliza Matengu.
She was the replacement. That is not a slight — it is the shape of the story, and she played it like one. As she tells it, she read the comics, deliberately did not watch the 1985 film, and trained with swords in Bulgaria for a month before shooting, because Bassett likes long, unbroken fight takes. Samuel Goldwyn Films brought the film to the US in August 2025, first as a limited event in cinemas and then on digital platforms. The reviews split. Whatever anyone thought of the film, nobody walked out doubting that she could carry a sword.
Where she stands
Put the three anchors in a row and the shape of the career is unmistakable: the girl who took the tape, the woman who walked out of the desert, and the warrior who picked up a sword that was not originally meant for her — spread across more than a decade of steady work in three languages, most of it far from the franchise machinery. Twice now she has been the actor who got the call after somebody else said no, and twice she has made the part look as if it had been written for her.
That is the real through-line. Not the cursed tape, not the blood-caked desert, not the sword — the nerve. The next time a horror production needs someone to survive the worst night of her life and make you believe every second of it, there is a short list, and a shy kid from Milan who used acting class to get over stage fright is near the top of it.