If you don’t know who Nina Bloomgarden is, you need to catch up. In recent years, the up-and-coming actress has been busy, bringing a deep emotional authenticity to all her roles. Whether she’s playing a misfit in the super Jewish summer camp movie “The Floaters,” a webcam boy’s bestie in Apple TV+’s “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” or a mysteriously disappeared tourist in “The Resort,” you simply won’t want to look away when Nina is onscreen.
Here are 18 things to know about her.
1. Nina Bloomgarden was born on Feb. 2, 1998 in New York.
2. She’s an Aquarius!
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3. Nina has Jewish heritage on her father’s side and Guatemalan ancestry on her mother’s.
4. She and her sister Gabriela were pretty adorable kids!
5. Her paternal grandfather was Kermit Bloomgarden, the theater producer known for bringing “Death of Salesman,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Look Homeward, Angel,” “The Music Man” and “Equus” to Broadway.
6. But Nina’s whole family tree is creative.
“On my mom’s side, we have photographers, visual artists, builders, musicians, an author, and my mom is a classically trained singer. And on my dad’s side, my grandma was an [actress], my grandfather a Broadway producer, and my dad had his fair share of jobs in the business eventually working as an editor,” she told People Magazine in 2022. “I grew up not realizing there were other jobs not related to the arts. So, I guess my family inspired me and continues to inspire me.”
7. Nina attended The Beacon School in New York and then Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
8. She made her film debut in the movie “Early Light” in 2014.
9. Nina has some pretty sound advice for aspiring young actors.
“My advice to aspiring actors is to take classes,” she says. “Movement classes, voice classes, technique, clown, anything. I don’t think drama school is necessary for everyone, but I think keeping up with your instrument is. It’s extremely important for us to have a place to play, explore and work off other people.”
10. We desperately need her hair routine:
11. Nina says “the weirdness” is what drew her to play Violet Thompson in “The Resort.”
“There’s like a lot of moments that are just so bizarre but written so well that it just makes sense,” Nina said in an interview with The Upcoming.
12. In the show, Nina’s Violet is dealing with the death of her mother. Sadly, Nina was able to use grief over her own father, who died weeks before she was asked to audition. “Getting to grieve through Violet has been such a blessing,” she told W Magazine. “They really let me shape Violet.”
13. Nick Offerman plays Nina’s onscreen dad in “The Resort” — and he actually taught her how to use chopsticks for a scene they were in together.
“There’s a scene in the show where we’re using chopsticks, and Nick’s teaching me how to use chopsticks. That was actually him genuinely teaching me,” Nina told The List. “We didn’t know the cameras were rolling. He used to live in Japan. He lived in Japan for a year. I was doing it wrong, and he really taught me my lesson.”
14. Nina got to work with Anne Hathaway on “The Idea of You” and says she learned from her “how to be on a set, and how to hold yourself, hold the room, and hold the space.”
15. Please enjoy this still of Nina from “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed“:
16. In “The Floaters,” Nina plays Lindsey, a floater at Camp Daveed who is iced out by her normal friend group but cares deeply about her Jewish identity.
17. When Nina read the script, she says she connected with what Lindsey was going through, especially when she was a teenager. You can listen to her reasoning here:
18. Nina says the plethora of Jewish backgrounds on set of “The Floaters” was “healing.”
“It was so cool to get on set and everyone has a different background and has grown up in different homes. Some more secular, some more spiritual, religious,” she said in an interview. “I’m half Jewish and half Guatemalan so I got to meet a lot of people with similar backgrounds to me. Which is like, they’re not many of us out in the wild. We’re there, but it’s like, we’re always missing each other.”
