Oscar Nom Catalina Sandino Moreno to Join Broderick in The Starry Messenger

Catalina Sandino Moreno will star alongside Matthew Broderick in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Starry Messenger when the play debuts off-Broadway this fall. The Columbian actress made a spalsh in Hollywood when she was nominated for a 2005 Academy Award for her acclaimed performance in Maria Full of Grace.

Born and rasied in Bogota, Columbia, Moreno started acting in her native country as a student of the Ruben Di Pietro theater school, where she acted onstage in various plays including The Dark Room by Tennessee Williams and Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang. She won the leading role of a drug mule in Maria Full of Grace from a casting call and received rave reviews for her raw performance. She won the Silver Berlin Bear Award for Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival and an Independent Spirit Award for the film, in addition to her Oscar nomination, which made her the first Columbian and third Hispanic actress to receive an Academy Award nomination. She has also starred in the films Fast Food Nation, The Hottest State, Love in the Time of Cholera and Che. Moreno moved to New York City after the release of Maria Full of Grace to study at the Lee Strasberg Institute, and made her New York stage debut in an off-off-Broadway staging of Shakespeare’s King John by the Frog & Peach Theatre Company in 2004.

The Starry Messenger follows Mark (Broderick), who teaches about the mysteries of the galaxy at the Hayden Planetarium. When the married forty-something meets a pretty, young single mother (Moreno), his “own solar system begins spinning out of control, forcing him to come to terms with the inertia that is his life.”

The Starry Messenger will premiere at The New Group in October.