CBS
A Salute to Rising Stars
It’s that time again to salute those actresses who are on the move, actresses who deserve a little extra attention for their latest work, those actresses who are rising stars. Landing that crucial role in a TV movie or guest appearance in a successful show or film makes all the difference for aspiring actors.
Let’s take a look at the next group of actresses who viewers should keep their eyes on:
Leah Lewis
The nearly 30-year-old was born in Shanghai, China. She was adopted from a Chinese orphanage as an infant, growing up in Florida and then Los Angeles. She discovered performing arts while living in Florida where she got her start acting in commercials. At the age of 17, she auditioned for the 4th season of The Voice but did not make it onto the show.
A few years after that she appeared in the Disney shows Best Friends Whenever and Gamer’s Guide to Pretty Much Everything as well as the YouTube Red series Sing It!.
Once she moved back to Los Angeles permanently, after graduating high school, she began to book guest roles in TV shows like Light as a Feather, The Gifted, The Good Doctor and Station 19. Around this same time she appeared in several episodes of the reboot of Charmed on The CW, and that led to her being cast in the 4-seasons-long TV adaptation of Nancy Drew, which also aired on The CW, where she played attorney-wannabe George Fan (based on the original character George Fayne).
It was then in 2020 that she landed her first major film role as the lead character, Ellie Chu, in the Netflix movie The Half of It, which won the Founders Award for Best US Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival.
She has also lent her voice to animation, including the TV series It’s Pony, voicing Batgirl in Meet the Batwheels as well as Batwheels and then landing the lead voice in the animated film Elemental as well as one of the main voices in the animated film The Tiger’s Apprentice.
Leah currently stars as Sarah Yang on the hit CBS reboot of Matlock, which stars legendary actress Kathy Bates in the title role. Leah has even had the opportunity to sing on the show, putting her singing talents to work.
The next new episode of Matlock will air on CBS this Thursday at 9 PM.
Leah can be followed on Instagram here.
Isa Briones
Isa was born in London, England to a family of musical theatre actors. In fact her parents met while auditioning for Miss Saigon. The family moved to New York City when she was just 10 months old, and she began working as a model at the tender age of 3. Four years later, the family moved to Los Angeles where she eventually majored in theatre and musical theatre at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.
Among her stage appearances are Miracle on 34th Street, Evita and Next to Normal as well as becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest person to join the first national touring company of Hamilton in which she played both Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds during its first year of touring.
In 2018, she appeared in the anthology series American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace and then starred as Soji, an android “daughter” of Data in Star Trek: Picard starring alongside Patrick Stewart. She followed that up with a starring role in the Disney+/Hulu series Goosebumps: The Vanishing, which also starred Friends alum David Schwimmer.
More recently, she has appeared on the stage in Grease as Betty Rizzo and last year she joined the cast of Hadestown on Broadway as Eurydice. It should be noted that her actor-father Jon Jon Briones appeared alongside her as Hermes.
Isa can currently be seen as Dr. Trinity Santos, starring alongside ER and The Librarians alum Noah Wyle, in the MAX medical drama The Pitt.
The Pitt will air its next new episode of its debut season this Thursday on MAX. And the series was just recently given a second season renewal by the streaming service.
Isa can be followed on Instagram here.
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