T.V. Carpio
In her first starring role, Teresa Victoria Carpio - or as she is now more commonly known, T.V. Carpio - plays an Asian-American drifter in Julie Taymor's Golden Globe and Oscar-nominated musical Across the Universe. But the Filipino-Chinese actress says it wasn't the daunting task that it could have been, as her character's experience mirrors her own.
'I can definitely relate to not fitting in and being alone,' says the Oklahoma-born actress, who spent her childhood at an international school in Hong Kong and moved to Springfield, Missouri, at the age of 11. 'I personally experienced racism and not fitting in, being the American idea of a nerd.'
Carpio says she struggled when she returned to the US, where she was subjected to bigotry because of her Asian ancestry.
'I was not conscious of racism [before returning to America]. I'd never known what a 'chink' was in Hong Kong.
I just didn't know it existed,' she says. It wasn't long before she did, and she didn't take it lying down: she was expelled from school when she was 12 after beating up a boy who called her mother, singer Teresa Carpio, a chink.
'I understand the feeling of not fitting in, not having any friends. I definitely understand why she wants to run away,' says Carpio of Prudence, the character she plays in the film. A cheerleader from Ohio, Prudence is rootlessness personified: she runs away from home, arrives in New York, falls for a raunchy female singer (Dana Fuchs) who offers no love in return, and moves away to join a circus before returning to join the film's other characters - young Briton Jude (James Sturgess), his American girlfriend Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) and her brother Max (Joe Anderson) in a rooftop finale.
Carpio didn't run away, but relocated to New York to pursue a figure-skating career two years after her expulsion. A knee injury scuppered her ambitions when she was 14, however. 'Technically, I just wasn't good enough to be an Olympic ice-skater. So I thought I'd better just let it go and find something else to do,' she says.
She eventually found her way into show business. Starting out as a freelance performing artist in New York when she was 20, she danced for Carson Daly's show and Justin Timberlake's boy band N'Sync at the MTV Music Awards in 2000, appeared in the TV show Law & Order as a laundry lady and in bit-part roles in The Jury and She Hate Me. Her break came when she landed a role as a Chinese gangster's daughter in Spike Lee's TV series Sucker Free City.
And then came Across the Universe. 'Besides landing an acting job, I was able to sing, and it wasn't a stereotypical role,' says the actress, who learned jazz vocals for two years at New York's New School University.
'I just don't want to do any movie where I have to talk with an accent like I can't speak English when I can. I've lost many roles because I'm not 'Chinese' enough.'
Carpio says her mother never pushed her towards a showbiz career, but that she passed on advice about how to conduct herself in her new job.
'She always told me when I was a kid, 'Look, you come here to work, not to play and make friends',' says Carpio.
'I didn't understand why she would say that to me. Now as I grow older, I carry that with me wherever I work.'
Across the Universe opens today
