Maika Monroe

Maika Monroe is an American actor whose breakthrough came through a cluster of sharply different 2014 performances. Born Dillon Monroe Buckley in Santa Barbara, California, on May 29, 1993, she used Maika Monroe professionally after beginning in acting and competitive kiteboarding. Before her horror prominence, she appeared as a member of the celebrity-obsessed group in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013), a film based on the real burglaries committed by the so-called Bling Ring.

Her defining early role was Jaime “Jay” Height in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014). The film’s premise turns a sexual encounter into a curse: an entity relentlessly walks toward its victim, assumes other people’s forms, and can be passed on through sex. Monroe plays Jay as she and her friends try to understand its rules and evade it around suburban Detroit. It Follows premiered at Cannes in 2014, and its success made Monroe a conspicuous new presence in independent genre cinema. That same year, she played Anna Peterson in Adam Wingard’s The Guest, opposite Dan Stevens as a soldier welcomed by the Peterson family who proves far from what he claims.

Monroe moved between studio productions and smaller thrillers rather than remaining in one lane. She portrayed Patricia Whitmore, daughter of former president Thomas Whitmore, in Independence Day: Resurgence (2016), Roland Emmerich’s sequel to Independence Day. In 2018, she led the science-fiction thriller Tau as Julia, a captive trying to escape a technologically controlled house, and appeared in Neil Jordan’s Greta as Erica, the roommate of Chloë Grace Moretz’s Frances. In Villains (2019), directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, Monroe and Bill Skarsgård play Jules and Mickey, robbers who find a girl imprisoned in a seemingly ordinary home.

In 2022, Monroe returned to psychological suspense in Chloe Okuno’s Watcher, playing Julia, an American newly living in Bucharest who believes a man across the street is following her. The film places its tension in Julia’s isolation, and Monroe’s performance carries scenes in which her concerns are dismissed. She then played FBI agent Lee Harker in Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs (2024), opposite Nicolas Cage. Set in the 1990s, the horror investigation follows Harker as she pursues a serial killer whose crimes involve families and occult clues. Monroe also starred as “the Lady” in JT Mollner’s Strange Darling (2024), a nonlinear thriller built around a one-night encounter that becomes a violent chase. Together, these films show her range.