Roberta Rodrigues

Roberta Rodrigues is a Brazilian actress and singer whose screen career began with *City of God*, the 2002 film directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. She played Berenice, the girlfriend of Cabeleira, a young criminal portrayed by Jonathan Haagensen. Berenice wants Cabeleira to leave crime behind, giving their relationship a place in the film’s account of violence and constrained choices in a Rio de Janeiro neighborhood. Based on Paulo Lins’s novel, *City of God* brought Rodrigues to an international audience and remains her best-known film credit.

Rodrigues later became a familiar presence on Brazilian television. In the Globo telenovela *Salve Jorge*, broadcast from 2012 to 2013 and written by Glória Perez, she played Vanúbia. The character’s scenes were set in Rio’s Complexo do Alemão, one of the locations through which the series connected its stories of family, romance and crime. Vanúbia was a conspicuous comic presence: confident, outspoken and attentive to her appearance. The part gave Rodrigues room to play a character markedly different from Berenice, whose story in *City of God* is bound to Cabeleira’s danger.

Another prominent television role came in *A Regra do Jogo*, João Emanuel Carneiro’s telenovela broadcast from 2015 to 2016. Rodrigues played Ninfa, who appeared alongside Alisson, played by Letícia Lima, in storylines involving the singer Merlô, played by Juliano Cazarré. Their scenes brought music, dancing and comic rivalry into a series otherwise driven in large part by secrets and criminal intrigue. For viewers who knew Rodrigues from *City of God*, Ninfa offered a contrasting performance built around humor and the rhythm of an ensemble cast.

Music is also part of Rodrigues’s public career. She performed with Melanina Carioca, a group associated with Rio de Janeiro’s Vidigal community that brought together performers working across music and acting. That connection between the two fields is visible in her television work as well: *A Regra do Jogo* placed her in a fictional musical circle, while Melanina Carioca provided an actual stage for her as a singer. Rodrigues’s credits therefore trace more than a move from film to television. They include an internationally recognized debut as Berenice, two distinctly different Globo characters in Vanúbia and Ninfa, and performances with a Rio-based musical collective. Those named roles, rather than a single type of character, show the range of work for which she is known.