From rural Poland to the Earth Kingdom, Maria Zhang finds home in Acting | CREATION

most of my parents are artists my mom is a oil painting restoration artist and my dad is a sculptor i just just knew that this was gonna be pretty much my life my dad's chinese my mom's polish and they met in st petersburg in this art school and neither of them spoke each other's language so they ended up falling in love and learning a common language just to be together a few years later they got married and had me in poland and then i flew back to beijing when i was around one and pretty much spent my whole childhood there i went to chinese primary school i spent my summers in poland where my grandparents are it's in the middle of the countryside this beautiful farm we grow our own fruits and vegetables and one summer when i was 12 i saw this newspaper clipping of a community theater group casting call where they were looking for anyone immediately me and my sister were like oh my gosh this is like our thing now we have to do it it was honestly so freeing i felt so alive just being immersed in the story and loving that we've created this bubble of a world purely based on our imagination where people get to come and be a part of and be transported into this world and then be inspired by it and then go back to their own lives i just felt like it was a calling and i thinking back on my life like the happiest i've been was when i was just in poland running around on the field rehearsing these like dances hope for the play with my friends and then running these lines i felt like i would always regret it if i didn't try it which then led me to la where i went to usc for acting and got official training for it and realized how tough it is out here it was really scary but at the same time i remember being on the flight and seeing like the hollywood sign out the window for the first time and thinking like oh my gosh this is me making my dream come true and then junior year is when i did amsterdam a play that was directed by lilac dekalb neri who was a israeli theater director that came to visit usc and that's where gina my current manager saw me and i play in the play i got my first biggish project which was film independence it was a story written by a queer vietnamese american writer van now the short film's making its rounds throughout different film festivals and then the i guess big role came when i was cast as sookie in the netflix live action adaptation of after the last airbender that was honestly like the best first experience i could have ever gotten as an actor amazing group of people that truly are fans of the story and our showrunner albert kim is korean american he really made an effort to cast all asian cast and crew ish and at least you know everyone has to be a fan i think film has the power to really make people feel like it's okay to be a little different and it's okay to not really know who you are and where you belong to just yet and that just because you're still figuring it out that's totally okay yeah i just hope i can keep inspiring people through my craft and hopefully give back to the community that you know gave me so much while i was growing up do [Music] you

Channel: Hyphen Magazine

Views: 239,734

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Id: n6DmDScpqGU

Length: 4min 34sec (274 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022