Who plays moana

Who plays moana
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6 wins & 10 nominations.

As of the time of her casting for Moana, she lives in the town of Mililani with her mother, Puanani Cravalho.

Moana is such an amazing character. She's brave, she is so empowered, she knows what she wants and she's not afraid to get it, and I think that's something that I can relate to as well. I just love watching how she goes along in this wonderful movie...

Chloe Auli'i Cravalho
November 22, 2000
Kohala, Hawaii, USA

Height:

5' 3" (1.6 m)


Auliʻi Cravalho’s life changed forever at age 14 when she was plucked from obscurity and cast as the voice of Disney’s “Moana.”

Auliʻi Cravalho’s life changed forever at age 14 when she was cast as the voice of Disney’s “Moana.” The Hawaiian native loved singing and acting, but they were just hobbies to her. So were horseback riding, swimming and microbiology, for that matter. A career in Hollywood seemed implausible at best.

“But life decided to surprise me,” said Cravalho, who went from obscurity to performing at the Oscars in just a few months.

Now at 19, Cravalho is checking off another milestone: Her first live-action film, “All Together Now,” is being released on Netflix Friday. And once again, she’s in the lead.

Based on Matthew Quick’s novel “Sorta Like a Rock Star,” the film from director Brett Haley finds Cravalho playing a very different kind of character from the adventurous Polynesian princess. Amber is a high school student with a to-die-for voice, an unflappable optimism and a dream of going to Carnegie Mellon. She also happens to be living in a school bus with her alcoholic mother.

“This felt like the next step,” she said. “I’m a little older and I love the challenge of showing these tougher emotions and telling these deeper stories.”

She’d actually auditioned for Hayley before. She didn’t get that part, but he promised he’d remember her.

“I was like, sure, OK, I’m never going to hear from this guy again,” she laughed. And then Amber Appleton came along.

“I really related to Amber. I genuinely I understood her optimism,” she said. “I am an optimist almost to a fault myself. I also have to kind of get real and be like, ‘Oh, wait, I can reach out and ask for help.’”

Cravalho had already had some on-camera experience, including in the short-lived television show “Rise,” which was canceled after one season. (“My first heartbreak.”) But she was nervous about a feature film and acting opposite people like Carol Burnett.

“My biggest challenge is figuring out what to do with my face on screen,” she said.

Thankfully, she had an unusually empathetic and supportive director in Haley, who helped her feel comfortable and gave her space to play around with her character and lines. And he’s excited for audiences to see her in a more dramatic role.

“Yes, she’s optimistic. Yes, she’s bright and shiny. But she also has a depth of emotion. She really is layered. She’s not just this Disney princess,” Haley said. “I think you can see that in her performance. She goes to so many different places in the role.”

Cravalho has for the past few years been living outside of Hawaii, first in New York and now in Los Angeles. She finished up high school on her laptop from the set of “Rise,” and she empathizes with all the students having to do that now.

For now, she’ll continue pursing acting and already has another series in the works in Amazon’s thriller “The Power,” but she’d also like to go to college and keep her options open. She’s only 19, after all.

“I’m not really sure where my career will take me. I’ve been lucky to play strong women characters so I hope I’ll continue on that path,” she said. “But I’m also young and figuring out what fuels me as a person and figuring out that my career (can be) different from who I am.”

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Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr

"I came out on TikTok ," Auli'i Cravalho says with a laugh. The Moana star is reflecting on her debut video on the platform, posted in April 2020, in which she declared her bisexuality while lip-synching to an Eminem track. Speaking to EW on Zoom a year later, the actress admits she didn't anticipate that the TikTok would result in dramatic "Moana is bi" headlines splashed all over the news and social media.

Back then, things were a lot more casual behind the scenes. Cravalho just wanted something to do at 3 a.m., an impulse that so many others likely felt in 2020.

"The funniest part to me was that I had girlfriends in high school," the 20-year-old says from London, where she's working on her upcoming Amazon Prime Video series The Power. "I think girls are great, but I wouldn't think that it was necessary to come out."

Who plays moana

Cravalho is thoughtful, even self-deprecating, when talking about her sexuality, though she says she wasn't sure how the public would receive her late-night announcement. So it was a pleasant relief that so many embraced her. "The fans are only too happy to accept another gay," she quips.

She even received messages from people she "hadn't talked to in a long time, like, 'Wow, that's really great. I wouldn't have the confidence to come out like you did in a TikTok, but hey, way to be real Gen-Z about it and push forward into the future.'"

Cravalho is thrilled that sharing her truth resonated with so many, but she's also refreshingly honest about how much she has to learn about other identities on the LGBTQ spectrum. She's not about to flex activist creds any time soon.

"I still sometimes slip up even with my friends, of integrating 'they/them' into sentences, because I'm so used to this binary of 'he or she,'" Cravalho says. "I'm glad that these terms are being used in film, because that's just going to help me and help others use it in their daily lives.

"My soul needs to grow as well," she says, adding that she's considering taking a professional break to attend college.

Being at the intersection of different identities in Hollywood can feel like "floating in gray matter," Cravalho admits. The native Hawaiian says that "more than once" she has experienced being pigeonholed and portrayed as the "racially ambiguous, Latin-esque girl who can sing and sings her way out of poverty."

To have more control of the opportunities she gets, Cravalho wants to create for herself. She's working on scripts with her best friend and would love to direct and eventually reconnect with Moana's Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi (who wrote an early version of the film's script), though she humbly notes that she's willing to "put out two or three short films and fail" before she's ready to "hit them up."

"I know that it will change and it is changing. And we're learning to love our features and our voices in their diversity, but it's also for me, at least as a young woman, I also am trying to not make waves still," Cravalho admits. "I'm still trying to hold myself as what I think is appropriate. And I'm like, 'Oh boy, if we all just relaxed into it, I wonder how I would act differently. What roles I would get if I relaxed into my fullest state, which I'm not sure what it is yet.'"

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Who plays moana

But she's hopeful: She recently started getting roles that are written as gay or bisexual, which she says is encouraging. As are shows like Sex Education, Euphoria, and Genera+ion, which understand what it's like to be young and queer, and beyond.

"I'm like, 'Oh, finally, this next generation is going to be so much more inclusive,'" Cravalho says. "If you're playing someone who is part of the LGBTQ spectrum, that isn't just the story line. There's so much more to them. We are straight-A students. We are avid readers. We have these wild imaginations. We don't know what the heck we're doing, but also don't just show us in the light of 'My sexuality is this burden,' because it's not. It is so joyful."

A version of this story appears in the June Pride issue of Entertainment Weekly. Don't forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.