‘Thai Angelina Jolie’ Praya Lundberg on the Rohingya refugee crisis, being a UN humanitarian and acting
- The Thai actress and model grew up in the spotlight as a child actor and her fame made her able to see the inequalities in her homeland
- In 2017, she was named Thailand’s first Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
With a successful television and film career spanning well over a decade, more than three million Instagram followers and endorsement deals with some of the world’s top brands, Praya Lundberg is a bona-fide A-list celebrity in her native Thailand.
The 30-year-old is also part of a cohort of Thai millennials who call themselves “third-culture kids”.
Lundberg’s mother comes from a rural part of Thailand and her father is a Swedish diplomat. Not long after her parents divorced when Lundberg was a year old, her mother married a British man, whom Lundberg considers her actual father.
“I was lucky because if my mum had not remarried I could have been like any other Thai kid who couldn’t get many opportunities,” Lundberg says. “I would probably be living in the rural area where she was born and my life would be very different now.”
Lundberg, who speaks English with an American accent and only learned Thai by parroting her lines when she started acting at the age of 13, had the typical upbringing of a child actor. She spent her days in school before heading to television sets for filming sessions that lasted well into the wee hours.
“It was a very tough period but it shaped who I am and was valuable because that type of upbringing made me understand the wealth gap in Thailand,” says Lundberg, who went on to earn a degree in law and politics in Britain.