Nava Mau plays the grown-up. In Baby Reindeer she gives Teri a steadiness the series around her never manages, and the only fair complaint is that there is not yet enough of her for us to be sure what else she can do.
Fi1m perspective
In Baby Reindeer (2024) Nava Mau's Teri is the one person behaving like an adult. Richard Gadd's Donny reads the emails again, does the thing he knows he should not, apologises to the wrong person; Teri, the woman he is trying to have an ordinary relationship with, wants the ordinary relationship and says so. The script keeps sending her home so it can get back to the laptop. Mau does not fight that. She plays Teri as someone whose life carries on when the camera is elsewhere, and we were relieved every time she came back, because the series is hard to sit with and she is the only stretch of it where anyone is being reasonable.
She did not arrive as an actor. Her first credit of any weight is Waking Hour (2019), a short she wrote, directed and starred in as Sofia, and which, like most shorts, was seen mainly at festivals. Television followed: a regular part as Ana in Generation (2021), then Teri, then a run of guest work, a detective in You (2025) among it. She has kept making shorts in between, with a second, All the Words But the One, in 2024, and she still writes and directs. "I started as a writer-director," she has said. "Acting is the ball that kept rolling and rolled faster than everything else."
What the work so far has in common is plain enough. Mau tends to play trans women in everyday relationships and everyday jobs, and she plays them without a speech attached. Teri is not there to explain anything to Donny or to us; she is there to have dinner and be let down. That is rarer than it should be, and it is the reason she stands out in a series full of people performing their own damage.
What we cannot yet say is what she does when a script is built around her rather than beside her. One supporting part, however well judged, is one supporting part. Our guess, on the evidence of the shorts, is that the answer will come from something she has written herself, and that when it does it will be quieter than the thing that made her name.
Biography
Nava Mau is a Mexican-American actress and filmmaker. Born in Mexico City in 1992 and raised in San Antonio, Texas, she holds a BA in linguistics and cognitive science from Pomona College.
She wrote, produced, directed and starred in the short film Waking Hour (2019), which screened at festivals worldwide. Mau has appeared as a series regular in the HBO Max series Generation (2021) as Ana, and played Detective Marquez in You (2018).
She is known for her role as Teri in the Netflix series Baby Reindeer (2024). For this performance she received nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award and a BAFTA, and won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Performance in a New Series.
