She made her screen debut with the Channel 4 film Sex Traffic, for which she won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress.

Marinca graduated from the University of Fine Arts, Music and Drama "George Enescu" in Iași.

[citation needed] In 2007, she starred in the Romanian film 4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) by Cristian Mungiu, which won the Palme d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival,[1] and two other awards (the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System and the FIPRESCI Prize).

Marinca appeared in the Romanian drama Boogie and Oliver Hirschbiegel's acclaimed Five Minutes of Heaven.

She later had a prominent role in the 2014 film Fury, in which she played a German woman named Irma who meets up with an American tank crew during World War II.