Catherine Laga’aia knows that her life may well change forever this week.
As of right now, the 19-year-old Sydney-sider can walk through her local shopping centre largely unnoticed despite the proliferation of movie posters bearing her face.
But as of this Thursday, when she will join Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson for a blue carpet event in her home town as part of a global press tour for the live action version of the beloved Disney animated adventure Moana that will also include Shanghai, London, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo, she can expect a whole lot more attention.
With Laga’aia in the title role of the intrepid Pacific Island teenager on a seafaring mission to save her people and Johnson reprising his role as the shapeshifting demigod trickster Maui, big things are expected of Moana when it’s released in cinemas on July 9. Laga’aia thinks she’s ready for life in the spotlight – but also glad she’s from a down-to-earth family and a relaxed part of the world.
“Saying goodbye to that – if I do have to – will be hard,” Laga’aia says of the prospect of losing her anonymity. “I’ll be like ‘dang – I’m no longer incognito’. I’m really excited to get to be a part of it … but I think in Australia and America it’s super different.
“In America I feel like they have more of a celebrity culture than we do down here. People will see a Hemsworth brother and they’ll be like ‘oh there’s a Hemsworth – anyway, this is what I was doing on the weekend ….’. but I can’t even picture what it’s going to look like stepping into this new chapter of this film.”
It’s already been a long journey for Laga’aia – the daughter of veteran actor and Play School presenter Jay Laga’aia – to get to this point. It started three years ago with a post on the Disney Instagram page announcing the global search for Moana and after some badgering from her agent and mother, Laga’aia finally self-recorded an audition (as did two of her sisters) the day it was due.
“I filmed it in her bedroom up against a random wall,” she says with a laugh. “I did two takes and then I was like, ‘I’m done – I’m not doing it again’. And I very belligerently gave it to her in a very 16-year-old girl fashion. But once I got the first call-back, I was like, ‘Oh, okay – maybe I should take this a little more seriously because now I really don’t want to lose it’.”
Many more call-backs later (she thinks it’s seven but she genuinely can’t remember) – including an intimidating, final, in-person audition in an empty New York theatre – and she’d landed the role. Then the real work began.
Although Laga’aia went to the Newtown School of the Performing Arts and did a Diploma of Stage and Screen performance at the prestigious National Institute of the Dramatic Arts (NIDA), her sole screen credit to that point was playing a younger version of Samoan New Zealand actor Frankie Adams (who coincidentally now plays her mother in Moana) in the Prime Video drama The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. Being front and centre in an all-singing, all-dancing, action-and-stunt heavy US$200 million blockbuster with hundreds of cast and crew was another challenge entirely.
“Stepping into something this big, I didn’t even know what I was going into,” she admits. “I have seen behind the scenes footage, but there’s only so much that you can learn and try and teach yourself. I think the best way to do it is to just get out there and go.
“We had three months of pre-production and then we were shooting and I think after those three months, I was like ‘someone bring a camera out – we’re going to film the movie, right?”
Having veteran Johnson by her side, Laga’aia says, was both a comforting and educational experience and his presence, professionalism and inclusiveness of her as newcomer have given her a “baseline” to aspire to for her future in the industry.
“The best thing about DJ is that you can learn from him when he’s not actually trying to teach you anything,” she says. “He will say hello to everyone. Everyone gets the chance to have their DJ moment and everyone’s feeling seen and represented. He’s a big guy so it’s very easy to feel like you’re standing in the shadow of him, especially when it’s just the two of us.
“But he was so adamant and so big on … ‘okay Catie what do you think?’ Or ‘what’s your opinion’. And I was like, ‘I’m supposed to have one of those? That wasn’t in my contract’.”
But if Laga’aia was impressed by Johnson, she was positively overwhelmed by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who composed music for the animated original and wrote a new song, All Along the Way for this version. Miranda’s long-time collaborator Thomas Kail directed the new Moana and meeting the pair of them in New York, the home of Broadway, was almost too much for Laga’aia.
“I saw him and I just collapsed to the floor,” she says with a laugh. “I was crying and sweating. I don’t know what about him was so shocking for me to me. I was like, ‘There is no way that this person is standing in front of me’. To this day, I have never been starstruck by somebody the way I was starstruck by Lin.
“He’s another super vibrant human being that radiates this incredible joy and he’s so proud and so happy to be a part of something like this and obviously his culture is a huge thing to him so I think he was excited get to experience a new one.”
Seeing her own South Pacific culture – Laga’aia is of Samoan and English descent – up on the big screen was one of the reasons that the original film had such a huge impact on the aspiring actor when she first saw it as a nine-year-old in 2016. She hopes that will carry on to the next generation of Pacific Islanders who see not only her face, but those of the other actors and hundreds of extras in the film.
“To see my own face almost on screen with a character that I really felt represented by and she had emotions like mine and she had grit like me – it felt like I could see aspects of myself in her,” she says. “And I feel like a lot of my siblings and a lot of my Pacific Islander friends had that same experience. That’s a very cool thing to get to experience so young and a lot of people in the previous generation of Pacific Islanders, specifically Pacific Islander young women didn’t get that.”
The strong theme of family in Moana also struck a chord. As one of eight child children, she says she leaned heavily on her parents and her siblings while making the movie, knowing that their support and ability to make her laugh could help her get through the most stressful of days.
“Family is the backbone of that film and it’s definitely the backbone of my life,” she says. “I couldn’t have done any of it physically, literally without my family.”
Laga’aia says that the best advice she got throughout the whole experience came from her father Jay, a 45-year veteran of stage, television, film, music and kids entertainment in Australia and his birth country New Zealand. When he accompanied her to that final audition in the Big Apple and she was feeling sick with nerves, he told her to just take a moment to appreciate everything she’d already achieved.
“He said ‘You’ve done so much and you’ve had such an incredible experience with this movie so far that even if you don’t get it, you’ve come out of this with something’, she recalls.
“Having that mindset of celebrating the opportunities that you have right now and celebrating the moments you have right now is the best way to live life. It’s the most present way that you can live life and experience things.”
Moana opens in cinemas on July 9.