Emilia Ares grew up in Los Angeles, which is another way of saying she grew up inside a mirage other people drove across the country to chase. Billboards, heat shimmering off the blacktop, the city stitched together with cheap dreams and expensive houses on the hill. Kids here learn early how to smile for cameras that aren’t even pointed at them yet.
She started performing at five, touring with a dance company while most children were still figuring out monkey bars. While other kids drew suns in the corners of notebook paper, she learned how to move her body into clean lines and perfect shapes, how to hit a mark, how not to flinch when the lights came up hot and bright. You do that long enough and it rewires you; you start to understand your own body as a kind of instrument, something you can sharpen, discipline, weaponize.
An Armenian kid in L.A., caught between histories. Armenia in the blood, Los Angeles in the lungs. Her relatives carried stories of war, genocide, displacement, whispered at kitchen tables; outside, palm trees leaned over streets named after saints and producers. Two realities, both stubborn, both true. The kind of background that teaches you early that survival is a skill, not a guarantee.
On paper, it all reads clean. Honors at Palisades Charter High School. Economics degree from UCLA, Russian minor, film history courses. The sensible major to appease the practical parts of the family, the language that nodded to the old world, the film classes for the part of her that already knew: stories were the only thing that made any of it make sense. Add in a beauty pageant: Miss Global 2013, first runner-up, representing Armenia. Smile so wide it hurts. Wear the sash. Wave like you were born with your arm already in that position. The outside world calls it glamorous. Inside, it’s work. Calculated posture. Practiced grace. A professional at performing perfection.
Then, the camera shifts.
Her first film role: Falling Overnight. A small movie, not the kind anyone drives past on a billboard on Sunset. No superheroes, no explosions. Just a girl named Chloe, a young photographer who meets a boy the day before his brain surgery. A 24-hour cliff edge disguised as romance. That kind of script doesn’t let you coast on cheekbones—you either find something real in it or you drown in sentiment. She didn’t drown.
After that, came the genre work—the horror anthologies, the found footage nightmares, the strange digital ghosts of V/H/S: Viral and The Dark Tapes. People like to sneer at horror, but horror understands something most polite films don’t: the world is already scary without the costumes. The monsters in those stories look an awful lot like fathers, lovers, teachers, strangers at bus stops. It’s a genre that deals honestly with fear and trauma; it just puts blood on the outside so you can finally see it.
Meanwhile, the day-job side of the dream factory keeps the lights on. National spots—Verizon with Thomas Middleditch and Jergens with Leslie Mann. Ads for Apple, Sony, Coca-Cola, the whole corporate choir. Thirty seconds at a time, smiling for this brand, that product, your face rented out like a billboard that can talk. Most people see a pretty girl selling moisturizer or unlimited data. They don’t see the years of work that go into being “discoverable” enough to stand in that white cyc, hit the mark, and drop a line that sounds effortless.
She moves through television, too. A pilot here—Unstrung for ABC Family. A guest spot there—Bosch, the detective walking the cracked streets of L.A. while she drops in as one more character in a city full of them. She shows up as Grand Duchess Anastasia on American Horror Story, a dead girl with a legacy so heavy it still rattles under the ice. The whole world argued for years about whether Anastasia survived. Maybe it’s fitting that in one timeline, she survives as an actress playing her.
She keeps working. Mr. Invincible with Bill Engvall and Alyson Stoner. No Escape, the follow-up from the guy who made Escape Room, this time locking people into a different kind of rigged game. There’s a pattern here: characters trapped in systems designed to eat them. That’s either coincidence or the universe being on the nose.
And then there’s the other life, the one even more dangerous than acting: writing.
She publishes Love and Other Sins—a contemporary novel that doesn’t flinch. Immigration, child abuse, trauma, first love. The kind of subjects people like to talk around with soft language and nervous smiles. She doesn’t talk around them. She steps right into the minefield and just keeps walking. Complex families that don’t fit into easy narratives, the awful quiet of what happens behind closed doors. First love as something that doesn’t fix the broken parts but sits with them anyway.
All that dancing, acting, smiling, surviving turns into sentences.
The second book, Love and Other Cages, comes out swinging harder. The title alone is the kind of thing that sticks in your throat. A cage is just a space that used to be called a home until the door locked. Publishers and critics start using words like “heart-wrenching thriller,” “multiple twists,” “sprawling,” “tense,” “powered by grand surges of feeling.” Behind all the polite praise is a simple truth: she’s writing about pain like someone who’s seen it up close. It’s not trauma porn; it’s a record of impact.
There’s something especially vicious about a world that cages people and then blames them for the way they rattle the bars. Her stories don’t buy into that lie. They understand that the bruises—emotional, physical, generational—don’t fade just because a new generation learns how to use better filters and lighter foundations.
What she’s really doing, in film and on the page, is studying captivity and escape. A girl raised performing for crowds, stepping into industries that love to own women: pageants, advertising, Hollywood. She takes the same body the world keeps trying to decorate and turn into an object, and she uses it to occupy characters who refuse to stay simple. She takes the same mind that was supposed to be satisfied with being looked at and uses it to write stories about what can’t be seen unless someone forces your eyes open.
There’s a particular courage in that. It’s not the loud, red-carpet courage of dramatic acceptance speeches. It’s quieter, meaner, more necessary. It’s the courage of looking straight at ugliness—abuse, displacement, emotional wreckage—and saying: I’m not going to pretend this is rare. I’m going to write it down so precisely you can’t look away.
In a city obsessed with the idea of “breaking out,” she does something more interesting: she breaks in. Into the machinery of commerce, of narrative, of branding, and uses the footholds it gives her to write about the cages other people are still sitting in. She moves between sets and blank pages, between scripts other people wrote and chapters that are fully her own. She doesn’t preach hope, exactly. Hope is cheap. What she offers instead is recognition: the sense that your private horrors are not unique, not unnameable, not unspeakable.
Emilia Ares is still young by the clock’s standards, but years in this town are like dog years—everything hits earlier, everything ages quicker. She’s already cycled through worlds most people never touch: the pageant stage, the casting room, the national commercial, the new-release shelf, the book review columns. She’s got time to reinvent herself again, and again after that. Actresses who write novels are supposed to be treated like dabblers. She doesn’t write like a dabbler.
She writes like someone who climbed out of a collapsing house and is now standing in the yard, covered in dust, calmly drawing floor plans so other people can see where the support beams failed.
Los Angeles will keep churning. New faces will pop up in new ad campaigns. New girls in sashes will smile their teeth out under hot stage lights. New indie films will quietly premiere and quietly vanish. But somewhere inside that noisy carousel, Emilia Ares is doing her own, much stranger thing: turning cages into stories and stories into keys.
Whether anyone notices or not, that’s real work.
The kind that outlasts billboards.
