All About The Rainmaker Star Lana Parrilla's TV & Movie Career: Everything to Know
Here's where you may have seen the actress behind Jocelyn "Bruiser" Stone before.
In the 1997 film adaptation of John Grisham's novel The Rainmaker, Mickey Rourke plays J. Lyman "Bruiser" Stone, an ambulance-chasing lawyer with some dodgy methods. It's Bruiser who gives upstart lawyer Rudy Baylor his first job, setting in motion a chain of events that has Rudy arguing a major, potentially lucrative case. In USA Network's upcoming TV adaptation of the legal drama, Bruiser will be a little different. Actress Lana Parrilla will play Jocelyn “Bruiser” Stone, daughter of disgraced lawman J. Lyman Stone and the head of his strip-mall law firm.
Before The Rainmaker premieres on August 15, 2025, at 10 p.m. ET/PT on USA Network, here's everything you need to know about Lana Parrilla's acting career.
Lana Parrilla's Early Life & Career
Lana Parrilla was born in New York City on July 15, 1977, to parents Sam Parrilla and Dolores Dee Azzara. Her father, Sam, was a Puerto Rican baseball player who was a pinch hitter and left fielder for the Philadelphia Phillies for one season. She is Sicilian on her mother's side, and her aunt Candice Azzara is a stage and TV actress.
After graduating from Fort Hamilton High School, Parrilla studied acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse and made her professional acting debut in 1999, appearing in an episode of the UPN sitcom Grown Ups.
"When it comes to actors and training, it’s not just learning acting," Parrilla told Backstage in 2019. "There [are] so many parts that sum up and help shape a full artist. It’s not just reading a script and learning how to say your lines. I don’t know how one learns how to say anything, but I think as far as training goes, I just knew that there’s scene study [and] script analysis, but then there’s also so many other things that fall in line with that — vocal training, body movement, dance — and so these were all the things I studied in addition to scene studying. I created my own four-year program.”
Lana Parrilla's TV Career
Lana Parrilla is primarily a TV actress, having been in dozens of shows since her debut in 1999. After Grown Ups, she appeared in an episode of the Showtime series Rude Awakening, but her first series regular role came in 2000 when she played Angie Ordonez, secretary to Charlie Sheen’s character in Season 5 of Spin City. She appeared in an episode each of JAG and The Shield before her next main role as Teresa Ortiz, paramedic-turned-police rookie in the NBC crime procedural Boomtown, which aired for two seasons in the early ‘00s.
She had a recurring role as Officer Janet Grafton in NYPD Blue, played a member of CTU in 12 episodes of the fourth season of 24, and was a series regular in the shows Windfall, Swingtown, and Miami Medical.
But perhaps her best-known role is that of Regina Mills — aka the Evil Queen — in ABC’s remixed fairy tale drama Once Upon a Time. Parrilla starred in all seven seasons of the series, which aired from 2011 to 2018.
"I think Regina is a very hopeful character because she’s so flawed and complex," Parrilla told Entertainment Weekly in 2018 when discussing Once Upon a Time's final season. "And human beings are, life is hard. It comes with lots of challenges and lots of decisions and choices that need to be made by oneself. Following Regina’s journey over the years, we’ve seen that she’s made some mistakes, but she picks herself back up, she has support from loved ones and friends, family, and she doesn’t really walk through life alone. I think she’s an inspiration to many, including myself. I’ve learned so much from her."
More recently, Parrilla had a main role in Season 2 of the anthology series Why Women Kill playing Rita Castillo, and she had a recurring role in the sophomore season of The Lincoln Lawyer.
Lana Parrilla's Movies
Although Lana Parrilla’s credits are mostly on the small screen, she has some movie credits as well. One of her first roles was the 2000 sci-fi horror film Spider, in which she played the main role. She had a small role in the crime-comedy film Very Mean Men that same year. More recently, she had a role in David Ayer’s 2020 action thriller The Tax Collector and appeared in the Jennifer Lopez sci-fi movie Atlas, which premiered on Netflix in 2024.
The Rainmaker premieres on USA on August 15, 2025, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. You can stream tons of great crime TV shows on Peacock while waiting for The Rainmaker to make its debut on USA Network.
