Dark and sensuous in a heavy metal kind of way, Argento is the daughter of Italian director Dario Argento, whose work has often been in the horror genre. His daughter had one of her earliest screen roles in "Demoni 2: L'Incubo Ritorna" (1986) which was written by her father. The elder Argento also scripted "The Church" (1988), in which Asia Argento was cast as a young girl who encounters an unspeakable evil. She went on to play a sexually-abused daughter in "Close Friends" (1992). The next year, she made her English-language debut in "Trauma," written and directed by her father, in which she was the daughter of Romanian immigrants who encounters a buzz-saw killer. While the film was not a box-office smash, it was popular among the elder Argento's fans. Many American cineastes were not aware of Asia Argento, however, until "La Reine Margot/Queen Margot" (1994), in which she portrayed Charlotte of Sauve, the young baroness who gets poisoned.

In 1996, she was one of a cast of 120 in the experimental "Bits and Pieces,” which intertwined 30 stories about life in Rome. That same year, she was an angry and detached teenager who agrees to go on a journey with a retired academic in "Travelling Companion" and an undercover cop who suffers from "The Stendhal Syndrome", in Dario Argento's thriller about a policewoman tracking a serial killer. In 2002, Argento was cast in the summer blockbuster hit,"xXx". After that, she went to France to film "La Sirene rouge", a French feature directed by Olivier Megaton. She then appeared in Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days” (2005), a fictional rendition of troubled rock star Kurt Cobain’s final days before his self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head.