We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yui Shibata a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Yui, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

As I’ve living as a film actress for a decade, I have done so many projects including film, television, and theater as well, so it isn’t easy to pick one out of everything. I’ve talked about my experiences on TV/film projects a lot when I get interviewed, but today, I want to talk about my meaningful project in theater. Back in my early 20s, I performed in Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” at Shakespeare Orange County – a professional theatre company in California that has a strong relationship with media and film productions. My role was Ariellete who is an original character in our script and got many scenes with Prospero (played by the legendary actor Harry Groener – nominated for three Tony Awards, and starred in the Oscar-winning film “Oppenheimer”). He taught me a lot of things as an actor. For example, he taught me how to rehearse my voice and body quickly right before the show started. Also, this theatre produces multicultural Shakespeare plays every season. They cast Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Mexican, and American, and put multicultural essences on their plays. It encourages me as an Asian actor because Shakespeare’s play is traditional and is always played by caucasian actors. Shakespeare Orange County destroyed stereotypes in a good way. So their shows always appeared on TV and online streaming and got acclaimed.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’d like to introduce myself as a unique but girls-next-door typed actor. I’ve starred on a lot of shows on film/television, theater and social media. As an Asian and ESL (English as Second Language) actor in the United States, I used to struggle to play some types of roles. However, I found out that my minority could be used as my characteristic and by uniqueness. Actually it works successfully. Many productions, directors and producers admitted my characteristic.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Back in 2020 when the pandemic is happened in the world, everyone stayed at home. Since all of film productions have closed down, filmmakers including actors lost their jobs, and they almost gave up their carrers. During the disaster hitting our life, I started performing on live stream and video content for myself and my film production. Lukily, I gained over 70k follers and over 20M view on videos in total on social media. That numbers on social media helped my production to get developed. The advice I could give to those who just starting to build the social media presence is showing your strongest characteristics and keep working every day.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

When my performance makes people move and gives them motivation or positive influence, I feel this is the most rewarding aspect of being an artist or creative for me. For example, I heard my audience of the television show “Go West” that I’m starring in go traveling to the United States. I’m happy that they were motivated to go travel after they watched my show. These days, we post some episodes on YouTube for audiences to share their comments. This is a very good way to know the audience’s reactions, and we can see how much we give them motivation and influence.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://m.imdb.com/name/nm2388560/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_4_nm_4_in_0_q_Yui%2520sh
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yuishiba_?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
• Other: Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@yuishiba_?_t=8oORcQ6sDV8&_r=1