From To All the Boys actress to major superstar! Lana Condor has become a household name since starring in the Netflix series, but actually kicked off her career long before playing Lara Jean Covey.
“I worked really hard,” the actress told Backstage in May 2020 of her To All the Boys days. “And I gave everything I had to this franchise, I really did.”
Lana’s debut role was as Jubilee in 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, noting that she learned a lot about acting from that set.
“I watched the ways they conducted themselves,” Lana said of her costars. “You really set the tone of the day and how the day is gonna go with your attitude and your energy. People in the film and television industry are empaths; they can’t help but feel everything, so it brings everyone else down if you’re negative.”
Now that she’s more established in the entertainment world, the Netflix star is ready to make change. She told Backstage, “Although growing up, I really never saw anybody who looked like me in a leading role, I have always been desperate to make that change and I always thought I could, because it’s the way you think up here.”
Once the first To All the Boys movie premiered in 2018, Lana’s world changed overnight as she gained millions of followers.
“I had a week of transition where I was like, ‘I have to be OK with it. This is my new reality,'” Lana said of her newfound fame during a February 2019 interview with Cosmopolitan. “I know how many people are looking to me. I’ve had so many little Asian girls and older Asian women come up to me. Because of that, I’m really aware and proud of who I am and what I look like.”
Despite the positive parts of fame, Lana has also gotten candid about experiencing burnout.
“I was just saying yes to everything because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and you want to capitalize on it, and you want to feel like you’re fully embracing everything,” she told SELF in February 2021. “But I’ve never felt more horrible mentally. I was so burned out. I would go home at night and I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I would shake going to bed and shake waking up because it was just so much stimulation.”
That being said, she moved from Los Angeles to Seattle and has since started to “feel more human.”
Scroll through our gallery to see Lana’s transformation over the years.
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