Maia Reficco on Kit Connor, Pretty Little Liars Season 2, and Achieving Her Dreams

“When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of being Hannah Montana,” Reficco says.

BY P. CLAIRE DODSON

© All rights come to Teen Vogue

Maia Reficco loves to start a sentence with an exclamation. On acting in Do Revenge: “Oh my god! It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had shooting.” On if she’s seen Heartstopper, starring her Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow costar Kit Connor: “Oh my god! I love Heartstopper.” On the moment she heard Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin was renewed for season 2: “Oh my g—,” she cuts herself off in excitement. “I remember I just started bawling.”

She speaks with a breathless enthusiasm, whether she’s hanging out on the Original Sin set in upstate New York, pulling a late night in the U.K., or crashing at her co-star Malia Pyles’s apartment before they take on Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Hollywood. She’s 22 years old, and life is jumping from one fun experience to another, taking it all in, and realizing that you’ve achieved an early dream or two that you wished for as a kid. “When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of being Hannah Montana,” Reficco says.

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Reficco was born in Boston but grew up in Buenos Aires after her family moved back to Argentina when she was six years old. There was a cultural split — she didn’t speak Spanish then, a fact she seems surprised to recall now. “I could not identify more with my Argentinian side now,” she says. “I speak Spanish in my day-to-day life. I still live there. It's honestly what's kept me grounded all of my life. Speaking in Spanish and being home feels so nurturing to me.” She’s close with her family, including younger brother Joaquin, who she describes as a “brilliant, talented singer.”

© Joaco Reficco in his first single Caótico

It must run in the family: Reficco grew up singing, acting, and doing gymnastics, and loving all three. She felt destined to perform, to create. Her first acting role, however, didn’t go as planned. She nabbed a role in a Nintendo commercial for a Mario Kart game at 11 years old. “I was so nervous that I actually lost my voice the night before. I remember crying on my way to set,” she says. “I'm so nervous because it meant so much to me to finally be on a set. It'd taken so much convincing to make my mom let me that when we finally got to that point and the fact that my voice was gone and everything was so incredibly heartbreaking.” Luckily, the magic of automated dialogue replacement (ADR) saved the day.

It was one of the first times she realized her vocal cords could be connected to her emotional state. “Whenever I'm really anxious or whenever I'm really nervous, the first thing to go is my voice,” she says. Her voice is emotive, prone to excitable, memorable ups and downs in her acting and singing life. When we met on set in early 2022, she had laryngitis. She also had laryngitis when she filmed her self tape for Original Sin, recalls a throaty voice delivering her character Noa Olivar’s lines. It didn’t matter to the show’s casting directors — she snagged the role on Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin soon after. The nerves make sense. The original PLL was a big presence in Reficco’s early pop culture life. She painted “Ezria” on her bed frame in white nail polish; she was obsessed with Aria (Lucy Hale); she looked up to the sporty Emily (Shay Mitchell), who helped Reficco uncover her own bisexuality. All of those reference points came together in Original Sin, a show that has ushered in a year of tough lessons and hard-won wisdom for Reficco.

Because her enthusiasm and lightness isn’t a result of naïveté, a young starlet coming into fame. It’s both natural and earned, fought for over time. She achieved her Hannah Montana dream at 15 years old, when she began starring on Nickelodeon Latin America show Kally’s Mashup. But when she started the show, she said goodbye to her normal teenage years. In their place, a dream — but also an endless challenge.

“You're exposed to not only criticism and all the things that you know you're exposed to whenever you embark upon this career, this journey, but it was also a lot of people who feel like they had the power to comment on who you were as an actor, as a human, and as a performer,” she says. “Dealing with that was a huge challenge as a kid during such a defining age and time. Getting to find myself amidst everyone's opinion of myself was really tough.” It changed her life, in good ways and bad. “I feel like I'm a little bit bulletproof after that. I mean, don't get me wrong. I get really sensitive. I'm Cancer. I don't really take criticism really well when it's coming from a place of hate, to be honest. But, I think I've really grown into accepting who I am.”

© Photograph by Isack Morales

But she brings that closeness to her roles, whether she’s the sincere yet enigmatic Noa or the lighthearted, comedic Montana in Do Revenge. She’ll next get to share her acting talent in the movie adaptation of Laura Taylor Namey’s young adult novel A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow, where she’ll play heroine Lila Reyes alongside Kit Connor’s Orion Maxwell.

“Working with Kit was such a dream, he’s such a sweetheart, one of the most brilliant actors,” Reficco says. “We got along so well from the get-go. He’s become one of my favorite people. I was so excited to meet him because I loved [Heartstopper] beforehand, but after getting to work with him and learning from him, we became each other’s biggest cheerleaders. We were working really hard hours, but the more time we got to know each other and the more time we spent together, it just was more and more enjoyable.”

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© From Instagram of Maia Reficco & Kit Connor

The adaptation will change Lila’s heritage to match Reficco’s. “To be honest it’s the first time I’ve been able to play a character that we specify had lived in Argentina,” she says. “It’s not the same to be from Cuba or to be Argentinian. I wanted to make it as realistic and authentic as I could. It’s my first time speaking in Spanish with an Argentinian accent in a couple of the scenes, and being able to represent where I actually come from and where I grew up and what my culture is like.”

She teared up the first time she read the Argentinian parts the writers added to the script of the movie, which filmed this past summer. It was surreal, this moment when her childhood dreams and her lived experiences collided. Not too long after, she got the call about Pretty Little Liars season 2. She cried into the phone to co-creators Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Lindsay Calhoon Bring. “I was like, ‘Thank you guys for making my dreams come true.’”

Years later, she found she still had things to learn about herself. In the woods in upstate New York, where all the main actors on PLLOS have expressed feeling a sense of isolation, she began learning the difference between loneliness and being alone. “I'm a super sociable person, and I used to feel like I needed that as fuel,” Reficco says. She bonded with castmates, but she also spent prolonged time by herself. That time alone turned into music.

She wrote a whole album within a month, taking trips from set into a studio in New York City and driving six hours each time to record. “I think in that loneliness and in that mental noise and turbulence that I was going through, it made me connect with myself in a way that I'd never allowed myself to,” Reficco says. Her Halloween trip to Los Angeles was focused on finishing up that record, which she can’t wait to share. She’s proud, though it’s “a hard thing to say with my chest.” Music feels more vulnerable to her than acting, not a character to get lost in but something closer to the heart.