Dwayne Johnson says life, as the teen knows it, will never be the same. Perhaps that’s why her famous father was “apprehensive” when she was plucked from obscurity in Sydney’s suburbs.
As much as performers live by the universal truth that to tell a colleague “good luck” is to curse them, regulars of Australia’s cut-throat audition circuit have another seared into their psyche: if you see Jay Laga’aia (Star Wars, Play School) or one of his prodigious progeny waiting for the casting directors, you may as well go home.
Said local lore went global two years ago when Disney revealed Catherine Laga’aia – a 17-year-old high school student with no film experience – had the chops to helm the live-action adaptation of Moana, the Oscar-nominated celebration of Pacific cultures that is also one of the studio’s most commercially and critically successful animated properties.
That a Laga’aia beat out more than 32,000 international hopefuls for the titular role was not a shock to audiences back home. When the announcement came, Jay was touring with Grease The Musical, his son Iosefa was going on his fourth straight year with Hamilton, and daughter Georgia was set for Dear Evan Hansen.
But it was surprising to Catherine Laga’aia.
“I felt like I was at a disadvantage,” she says. “Like, I was so much further behind than everybody else in my family.”
Five of Jay’s eight children have inherited their father’s penchant for the performing arts. Laga’aia, however, is the only one not to have been a NSW Schools Spectacular featured artist. And she wanted it. So bad.
“I remember being 15 and being, like, wow … that’s peak success,” the now-19-year-old, who was a co-host and compere at the annual showcase in 2022, says, laughing, from her childhood bedroom in Sydney’s inner west.
Behind her is a corkboard pinned with family photos, including with sisters Georgia, 21, and Isabella, 17. Both submitted singing self-tapes for Moana but it’s Laga’aia who is flying out in the morning for the sprint at the end of her marathon: a globe-trotting press tour.
For now she’s reminiscing about the starting line three years ago, when she thought her “thing” was “straight acting, straight plays”.
Even the most casual of observers knows there is no Moana without How Far I’ll Go, the crucial “I Want” song with a D5 belt that sets the emotional stakes. “STRONG SINGER,” as stressed at the end of the open casting call, was a necessity.
It was also a problem.
Growing up feeling eclipsed by the power of her sisters’ pipes robbed Laga’aia of the desire to sing publicly. She wasn’t a featured artist because she never auditioned – she thought she wasn’t good enough.
“That was probably my biggest hurdle, having to not only learn how to sing the songs, because they are quite difficult and quite high, but also learning to love listening to them back,” she says.
Her mother Sandra was “adamant” she apply. Six months later she was the last Laga’aia in the race (Georgia and Isabella were “good sports” about it).
Standing between the then-16-year-old and the opportunity of a lifetime was an interview and screen test in New York.
“The girl in the audition before me came out and she said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry … I move so much when I sing.’ I was thinking, ‘Wait, I don’t have stage presence. I’ve never sung in front of real people. I don’t know how to do that’,” she says.
Imagining how her competitor approached the song, Laga’aia emulated that when she got in the room. Director Thomas Kail interrupted her performance – “I was like, ‘what, you can do that?’” – pulling her away from the cameras to instruct her to do what she, not someone else, thought was right.
Here’s another universal truth that can make or break stars: singing is all about breathing. Shallow breaths do not provide the diaphragmatic support required to soar through How Far I’ll Go’s melodic jumps, or even Where You Are’s rapid-fire lyrics. Anxiety was not an option.
“You just gotta do it, girl … don’t throw this away,” a shaky Laga’aia steeled herself. “They stopped me to help me, not to screw me.”
“She’s a natural … Life as she has known it will never be the same. I’m so proud of her for the job she’s done.”Dwayne Johnson on Moana co-star Catherine Laga’aia
A core component of Moana’s character – and partly why she shirks the “princess” label, preferring “daughter of a chief” – is her grit. To save the island of Motunui she has to disobey her father, sail across the ocean and drag an unwilling demigod (Maui, played by producer Dwayne Johnson) towards what he believes will be his demise.
“There’s a fearlessness,” Kail tells this masthead at the tour’s Sydney stop. The actress for the job needed to be someone who could access her power without sacrificing Moana’s vulnerability. “You can coach it but you can’t teach it … you either have it or you don’t.”
Laga’aia had it.
She got the call in February 2024. By May she was pulled from Newtown High School of the Performing Arts for pre-production overseas. (She credits the education and friendly competition with her like-minded peers at the partially selective public school as pivotal to coming out of her shell and securing the role.)
So began seven months of what Laga’aia describes as an elaborate game of hot potato, which included juggling her Higher School Certificate exams with filming.
She sat her English exam in front of a vanity on the first day of shooting in Oahu, Hawaii. “You look up and you’re just staring at despair and panic,” she says. It was “awful”.
Months later, in a Los Angeles trailer, her on-set teacher’s golden retriever kept her company during her final assessments. Sometimes Laga’aia would look down and see she had written her lines for the scene she was about to shoot instead of an equation.
Whatever stress she felt would be gone by the time she had to hold her own against Johnson, a Hollywood veteran as beloved as the franchise itself.
Much of the film is Laga’aia and Johnson bickering on a canoe, the endless back-and-forth requiring a knack for timing. That takes years to hone, says Johnson, and it’s “not like she’s had 15 big movies under her belt”.
“She’s a natural … Life as she has known it will never be the same,” Johnson tells this masthead. “I’m so proud of her for the job she’s done.”
The press tour is the first time Laga’aia is allowing herself to bask in this praise. She’s been sequestered from social media – her friends forbidden from forwarding good and bad commentary they’ve seen online – since the trailer’s release, when she saw the message “girl, no you’re not” written over a clip of her singing “I am Moana”.
Perhaps that’s why her father was “apprehensive” about her stepping into a role of such magnitude.
“Not because he didn’t believe that I could do it,” she adds, quickly. “But because he grew up in the industry. He knows how things can go wrong, and he knows all the sour sides of things … He had absolute faith that I could do it.”
That’s obvious from Jay’s Instagram account.
“As her father, watching that unfold has been one of life’s greatest privileges,” a recent missive gushes, “not because she became Moana but because she never stopped being Catherine.”
Laga’aia, whose grandparents are from Savai’i and Upolu in Samoa, relies on those who see her as both to carry her through.
“[Moana] is such a love letter to the culture … the community that we have,” she says. “When my casting was announced, when the trailer was announced, the people who had my back were the Pacific Islanders.”
What could she possibly do next to top this?
“Coming off Moana I was like, ‘I’ve got to do something bigger … something better’ … But I think my perspective is very much changed,” she says. “The amount of joy I got from Moana is the amount of joy I need to get from my next project.”
Moana is in cinemas from July 8.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
