We were lucky to catch up with Sofía Ko recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sofía, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I think I always knew I wanted to be in the arts. I feel like I was one of the lucky ones that knew what they wanted to do from a very young age and stuck with it. One of the earliest memories I have was when I was probably four years old and I was playing with this tiny toy piano. My mom had “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on in the background, and I remember listening to it over and over again until all of a sudden, I started playing it on the keyboard. I remember my parents being shocked that a literal child was able to pick up on the tune just by ear, and put me in classical piano classes pretty quickly. From then on, I played the piano for many years, learned the guitar, started vocal lessons, and started writing music. I remember in middle school, I was really into composing and writing music. At the time, there weren’t many computer-based music composition programs, and God knows I didn’t know how to use them at eleven years old, so I would write everything by hand. I showed my choir teacher at the time a song I wrote called “Good Night” and she absolutely loved it. She ended up bringing it into class and taught everyone the song which we ended up performing it in front of the entire school. I thought for a really long time I wanted to do music, but then I discovered musical theatre and fell in love with it.

I stopped for awhile because I got caught up in feeling weird or “othered” by most of the other students at my school who played sports. You know, you’re so young and all you want is to have a group of friends and not feel like the black sheep. But I remember feeling miserable and trying to get along with the “popular” kids was exhausting everything in me. For a long time, I didn’t have any friends. I remember eating in the school bathroom or going to the school’s library during lunch period because I didn’t have anyone to sit with in the cafeteria. It was really tough and I felt like an absolute loser!! My dad was awesome though, and he knew I was going through a tough time, so he would leave his job on half day’s just so I could have someone to go eat lunch with. We would always go to McDonald’s. It’s a really good memory I’ll always hold on to.

I think from there I kind of just started to just pursue the arts again. I was so sick of trying to fit in so I remember thinking if I already was this much of a “loser”, I might as well own it. I remember there was an audition for my high school’s spring musical that year and a girl in my Physics class who I had gotten acquainted with encouraged me to audition. She took me to a practice room after the school day ended and asked me to sing a 16-bar cut of the song I was going to audition with. I was really nervous but I remember she told me to close my eyes and pretend she wasn’t there. After I finished singing, I opened my eyes to her with her jaw on the floor. I was so confused! But I asked her if she was okay and I remember her saying, “Sofía, I thought I was going to have to lie to you and say you were good. But you’re actually really f***ing good”. Oh my god, I can’t even tell you how amazing that made me feel. From then, I just started auditioning for the school’s productions and found my people. We still never ate in the cafeteria though. I think I can count how many times I ate there on both hands, we always just ate in the school’s theater like the theater freaks we were.

I do think the turning point for me was my Sophomore year of high school. I was still very green to the Performing Arts department in our school which was notorious for being very good. My drama teacher at the time asked me to come to the METG’s (Massachusetts Educational Theatre Guild) Competition to be one of the representatives for our school. At the time, I still wasn’t very confident in myself, so I wasn’t exactly sure why he was asking me to go, but I went and sang two 16-bar cuts from “Spring Awakening” and “Rent”. I ended up winning second place in the entire festival for musical theatre. From then on, I was like, “Okay, I think I can do this”.

Sofía, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. It’s a super small suburban town that you can drive from one side to the other in about ten minutes. It was such a small bubble, but I have really nice memories growing up there. As I was getting closer to graduating high school, the college talk starts falling onto the table and I just knew I didn’t want to do anything other than acting, but something about it really intimidated me. I still didn’t feel like I was the best – or good enough – to pursue it as a career, so I ended up applying to a bunch of schools for a Bachelor in Arts in entertainment business rather than a Bachelor in Fine Arts that would focus solely on acting. I ended up between two choices on where to go: UCLA or NYU. If I’m being honest, I really did not think I was going to get into either of those schools because of how low their acceptance rates are and I knew from the jump how competitive it was to get in. I ultimately decided on NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Studies and spent my first year in New York City absolutely miserable. I was depressed, lonely, and wasn’t doing what I knew deep down what I wanted to do. I ended up auditioning for NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the middle of my freshman year, still feeling like I wasn’t going to get in, but then did. Everything kind of just changed from there.

The first big set I was ever on kind of landed in my lap. My dad had seen an ad on the Boston Globe for an undisclosed Netflix film that was looking for background actors and sent me the link. I ended up submitting for it not thinking anything of it and forgot about it for a year. A year later, I remember getting a text from a phone number I didn’t have saved asking me if I could have my bags packed and show up to set the following week; I was going to be there for a month. I thought I was being scammed and quickly ran to show my parents who encouraged me to hop on a call with this person. It ended up being legit, and was for the movie “Don’t Look Up”, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. I was buzzing with excitement and also a little numb because I was so shocked that this somehow had come back to me, knowing thousands upon thousands of people applied. It was an amazing experience. I lodged on set and had my own little hotel room; it felt like I was living my dream. One of the days we were shooting, I was randomly selected for a featured scene that had a close-up of my face. A few girls I had befriended on set and I went to see the film when it finally premiered in theaters a year later and my scene ended up making the cut. We were all giggling like little girls when the scene finally came up. It was so weird seeing myself plastered across the movie theater screen with so many other people watching it.

From there, I was a sophomore in college and had this realization of: why should I wait until I graduate to get representation? I was going to be facing the same problem either way, so I could either do it now, or in a couple more years; and I knew I didn’t want to wait. I did a showcase and got signed with my first agent. As soon as you get your foot in the door, you start meeting a bunch of people and word of mouth travels. I met my manager – who I’m still with and love! – through mutual connections and networking. I started auditioning for legitimate TV shows and films and through time, patience, luck, and a delusional amount of belief in myself, I started to book projects. A lot of people ask me how I got to where I am now, and I always tell them that at some point, I just really started to believe in myself – and I mean a crazy amount – and the Universe kind of just takes it from there.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Well, I think it’s not really new to people that the entertainment industry is extremely hard to break in to. I’m also no where near where I want to be yet, and still have a lot I want to accomplish. But I think the hardest times that I’ve experienced in my life came from personal matters that then affected my self confidence as an individual, which then bleeds into your work. I mean, even from a young age, I really felt so different and excluded from my peers, and I didn’t know why I couldn’t be accepted by them. And then you grow older, you know, you’re still figuring out who you are, who your friends are, what you value in life, you fall in love, you get your heart broken, you make a really bad financial decision, you hate what you’re studying, etc. All of these things kind of mold you into who you are today, and I know that’s not a super groundbreaking revelation, but it’s really things from my personal life that molded me to be more resilient in the entertainment industry.

I feel like most recently, I’ve really learned to separate myself and give myself space if I find myself in an environment where I don’t feel like my best self. Whether that be in a work environment, friendship, group setting, an individual who I’m often interacting with, etc. Of course growth is in places where it’s uncomfortable, but I think there is also a fine line where if you are somewhere or are interacting with someone that doesn’t make you feel good about yourself, it’s okay to quietly distance yourself. I think I really try to protect my little circle of energy and it’s something I’ve definitely strengthened over time. Also not comparing myself to others and finding what works best for me, and only me, has shown me tons of great success. I used to try to do a million things at once and I realized it was just burning me out and I didn’t have a concrete direction on where I was going. I think I felt like I needed to prove myself to people around me all the time, and it was doing more harm than good. Also, not really caring about people’s opinion of you. It’s really hard at first but once you strengthen that muscle, you realize people’s words aren’t going to stop you from getting where you are going. I’ve definitely had times where I overheard – or even felt – things that were being said about me. It really sucks, but you really just have to let it go through you and let it leave. I also do not like putting myself in competition with other people. I try to keep my work as private as possible even from my close friends (until I book the job, of course). It’s a competitive industry and my cue to leave a situation behind is when I start feeling like I have to outshine the people around me. You shouldn’t ever have to feel that way. And you should feel confident in letting your authentic self shine through without fear of “taking the spotlight away” from someone else or hurting another’s feelings. I feel really good about myself now; I feel really beautiful, really strong, really motivated and hardworking. People who see that part of you and feel any sort of envy or jealousy are not people I want in my circle. You should be able to be you.

So yeah, I guess that’s a long winded way of saying that it taught me to continue believing in myself, to continue loving myself, and to practice the faith that things always end up working out themselves out, because they do. And there were a lot of times – trust me – where I couldn’t see that, but I don’t think you’re meant to. I think you’re only meant to see it looking back. The pain is there for a reason, you just have to make it your friend and ride along with it until it decides it wants to leave one day.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I’ll always remember what Viola Davis said during her Oscar’s acceptance speech, “I became an artist, and thank God I did, because we are the only profession to celebrate what it means to live a life”.

An artist’s job is literally to explore what it means to be human. The ups and downs, the happiness and the sorrow, all the in betweens. I think I’m so lucky that I get to story tell and connect with other people through what it means to be alive. Everyone you know can tell you a time where they watched something that spoke to them. It touched something deep within them because the art spoke something that perhaps, they themselves, could never speak out loud. To be able to get to do that as a living? Man, I’m really lucky.

Actually I’ll get a little personal here; every time I’ve gone through something that broke me down in every which way, I always used art and story telling as a way to rebuild myself again. I remember when I got my heart broken when I was 18 or 19, I decided to start filming my friends in their everyday lives and ask them questions about their identity, struggles, etc. It healed something within me to be able to do that. I used the form of story telling to be able to showcase things I couldn’t bring myself to say. I think that became my blueprint on how to heal my heart again after getting it shattered into a million pieces. I continue to use music, rewatching my favorite films, writing, journaling, photography, etc. to mend things back to where they need to be. And that’s what’s rewarding about being an artist; that’s what’s rewarding about being human. We love really deeply and things don’t turn out the way we expected them to, but having art by my side allows me to express everything that my heart so desperately wants to say. That’s why I never really understand when people criticize celebrities for releasing art years after a really big scandal, breakup, etc. happened. I don’t think the general public understands that it takes a long time to create something so personal and be ready to release it to the world. I mean, if we really want to get into the nitty gritty, read into Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze. Coppola released “Lost in Translation” shortly after her and Jonze got divorced to express how she felt during their marriage. Jonze ended up releasing “Her” a whole ten years later as a response to Coppola’s film, describing how he felt after they were divorced. Art is romantic. Life is romantic! People need to stop viewing vulnerability and expressing emotion freely as a weakness. Love is beautiful, and so is the heartbreak that comes with it. That’s what we, as artists, get to do.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sofiavko.weebly.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sofiavko/?hl=en
• Other: IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm11101976/

Image Credits

Sara Gomez-Zuniga, Jack Becker & Kai Chang, Dan Winerman, Amanda Rodriguez