“I didn’t grow up a theatre kid, going to theatre camps. I played sports, and that was my main direction. But luckily, I never had to choose between sports and theatre.”

You always have to make positive choices as an actor, even when you’re playing someone who may not be doing the best things.

People saw me as just a singer – yeah, a pretty face who could sing – and not more than that.

I’m ready and open to meeting the person that hopefully I’ll share my life with. It takes a long time to get to that place.

What is wrong with you people?

After 9/11, the amount of applicants the FBI received increased exponentially. Whereas you used to require a college degree, and it was a small group of people who were just out of college, after 9/11, it changed.

I was a very awkward high schooler, especially in early high school. I had the middle part with a swoop, all that. It was the late ’90s!

Singing for stage, if you don’t hear yourself, that’s when you push, and that’s when you can hurt your voice sometimes. So if I can hear myself in my ear, it really helps me to find that balance of how loud I needed to be singing.

Once I came to acting, it was almost a thing where there weren’t enough hours in the day to work on stuff because I was so passionate about it.

Coming from a background of being onstage, you’re onstage for two and a half hours and you’re in it for the whole time no matter what you’re doing. Even if you don’t have a line, you have to stay in it.

I feel like I’ve been dealing with that building over the years because of the Broadway community, so I’m treating it in the same way – I’ve always tried to keep my personal life private. I didn’t get into this business for notoriety or fame. I don’t go to places to be seen and that’s not going to change.

I watched so many movies when I was a kid, and I’d watch them over and over.

In an ideal world for me, I would like to go back and forth [between film and theater]. I kind of want to do it all

Life doesn’t move in a linear fashion. Life makes lefts and rights, and it doubles back.

I was very unsure about what I wanted to do in high school.

I listen to all kinds of music, but I’ve always been a really big fan of Top 40 radio. If I’m in my car, that’s what I listen to.

Cats and I have an understanding, but we choose not to interact often.

You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.

I’ve always tried to be independent. It’s just my personality. I’ve always been the type to motivate the camp. I’ve always wanted to be the fuel for something—for music, the fuel for my family, the fuel for my best friend. Helping someone with what I’m doing.

I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.

But when we came out of camp, that’s when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.

My memories of camp – I was four years old to eight years old – they’re fond memories.

Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp.

When I was a little girl in a refugee camp I’ve always imagined being a model and so much more.

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps.