Meet Florina Petcu, Brooklyn College Soccer’s Captain via Hollywood and Romania
Florina Petcu has a unique resume compared to her teammates on the Brooklyn College women’s soccer team. She’s 37, a native of Romania and an accomplished amateur Muay Thai fighter who has represented the United States in world championship competition. She’s an actress with theater, TV and film experience who can claim a scene (pictured above) opposite Denzel Washington in 2006’s Inside Man.
In what the New Yorker called “the best cameo” of the movie, which you can watch here, Florina plays “a shameless, cigarette-waving Albanian floozy” bartering with cops played by Denzel Washington and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
The scene inspired a number of pointed questions from Albanian bloggers about what’s been viewed as a caricature of eastern-European woman. Critical Commons has two essays on the scene’s purpose and the responses it provoked — which, for what it’s worth, were mostly positive.
Florina describes the scene as “probably the beginning of a turning point in my life where I realized that this industry wasn’t for me.” She has since started a new chapter in her life.
Despite being a novice at the start of the season, she is now one of three captains of Brooklyn College’s soccer team. She’s taken on a maternal role, according to a recent Brooklyn College profile, “encouraging them to try harder and even screening potential suitors for them.”
That’s more than some actual mothers do.
After she finishes this semester, she plans to apply to master’s programs in clinical psychology and enroll in a one-year program in expressive arts therapy. She hopes to work with women and children who have been victims of domestic and sexual abuse, and she’d also like to be an anti sex trafficking activist.
“I’ve had so many opportunities here that have laid the foundation for not just the career that I want but the kind of person that I want to be and the kind of life that I want to live,” she says.
You can read more about Florina at Brooklyn College’s site.
Photo: Brooklyn College
