On Glamour's cover: The real Vanessa Hudgens

Glamour magazine chooses Vanessa Hudgens as its cover star for December.

In her interview, the Filipina American star talks about her long Hollywood career, her performance in the latest movie Tick, Tick ... Boom that is generating rave reviews and talk about awards and where she is now at age 33.

But two paragraphs in the Glamour interview stood out:

While Vanessa is understandably hesitant to talk too much about projects before they happen, there is one that she doesn’t mind putting out there: her own mother’s story of coming to the United States at the age of 25. “My mom is from the Philippines, and growing up there weren’t really that many women who looked like me and my mom and my family on screen,” she says. “It’s so important to share all the different stories because America is a massive melting pot, [just like the] world. There are so many different stories that need to be told so that we are exposed to them and can have more empathy towards different people.” Her hope is that her mother will write a book that Vanessa can one day turn into a film.

She continues: “As an immigrant, coming into the States and not knowing anyone, I can’t even imagine how difficult and challenging that is and what challenges she faced as a woman. And my father was a firefighter, so he was gone for a week and home for a week.” She says that while he was away, it was just her and her mom, Gina, until her younger sister, Stella – also an actor – came along. But at the time, her mother was finding her way in a new country with a young child. “I feel like that’s such a relatable story to so many women all over the world. The more that we can share, the more we can lift each other up.”

Vanessa Hudgens and her mother Gina.

READ the entire Glamour interview here.

With Hollywood producing so few roles that are Filipinos, she has been able to leverage her star status to make some of the roles she plays characters of Filipino descent with throwaway lines in her short-lived TV series Powerless ("I'm half-Filipino.") and one of the princesses in the Princess Switch trilogy ("My family is from the Philippines and we do hugs.").

Neither of the two roles were written as Filipino characters, but by the casting of Hudgens and I'm sure, at her suggestion, the writers were able to tailor the character to match Hudgens' real life ethnicity which she doesn't hesitate to proclaim. She doesn't want little Asian American kids growing up with no one on television who might look like them.

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