Maia Reficco Is Finding Her Way, One Part at a Time

If it wasn’t for the yerba mate steaming up in front of her, Maia Reficco might easily lose track of which city she’s in.

“I did five cities in five countries in five days,” she says. “I was in Monaco, Spain, New York, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, all in five days.” 

Now back home in Buenos Aires, where she’s stuck to living despite career pressures to move to the U.S., the Argentine actress and singer is more than happy with her busy schedule if it means getting to pursue both of her loves.

Reficco, who is 26, stars in Prime Video original movie “The Last Sunrise,” out Wednesday, in which she stars opposite Eva Longoria and Fernando Lindez. The story follows Ry, whose typical teenage life has been turned upside down by her health battle. When the opportunity to travel to Majorca with her mother on a work trip arises, she is prepared to spend most of the time shut in at the hotel — until an encounter with a handsome local changes everything.

Reficco was interested from the moment she heard the word “Majorca” from her manager. She’d just come off her Broadway run in “Hadestown,” which was “my favorite job I’ve ever done,” and was wondering what would be next. The script landed in her inbox while on a road trip in Australia visiting her best friend.

“I get really carsick. And I got the script and I was like, ‘I can’t read it right now,’ but [my manager] was like ‘read it,’” she recalls. “I wanted to throw up because of being carsick, but I was so excited to finish the script.”

Doing a romance wasn’t necessarily top of mind for her next role, but it’s a genre she’s always been drawn to. 

“As a woman, I think there’s something so divinely feminine about doing romance that I was looking forward to finding the right one,” she says. “Romance has always been a genre that’s been looked down upon because women liked it. It’s always been the butt of a joke. I think there’s something about how that is flipping now and it’s becoming arguably the biggest genre in the world at the moment and competing against numbers from all these male-driven action films. And I think having romance take that spot is so sick.”

Alongside promoting the film, Reficco is also releasing her own music, a lifelong dream. Her first single, “Amapola,” was released Aug. 20, with the rest of the EP expected in September. 

“I describe it as music is who I am and acting is what I love to do, because that’s kind of how it is for me,” she says. “It’s completely indispensable for my happiness. Whether I sing in private or whether I sing for others, I’m never going to change that because it really is. I don’t feel fulfilled without it.”

Writing music, which she does mostly in Spanish, has helped her make sense of her career thus far, which came with success at a young age. When Reficco was 17, she landed the lead role in the Nickelodeon Latin America telenovela “Kally’s Mashup,” after auditioning with the Ariana Grande single “Dangerous Woman.” 

“The way I perceived art and life obviously are very intertwined. And throughout the first years of my career and earlier on, I think I was very much mistaking stimuli for growth,” Reficco says. “I would put my self-worth and my life’s north star in things that were really, really skewed. It was hard for me to be discerning about what things were worth my energy and what weren’t.”

Her EP, then, is a collection of songs that are “each their own little universe,” which represent her search for her identity. 

“I do think that emptiness made room for so much space. And now I feel so much richer in how I understand what I want and need and prioritize,” she says.

Ahead, Reficco will be seen in “Baton,” actor Danny Ramirez’s directorial debut, and plans to devote much of the coming months to music and sharing “The Last Sunrise.” 

“I love being able to make people across the world connect with a story that might make them happy for two hours or that might make them emotional for two hours,” she says. “I do think there’s something to be said about how we are all in desperate need for some escapism and love stories. At the end of the day, the human experience is about wanting to be loved and wanting to love. Not much more to life than that.”