MOVIES
Moana
‘Moana’ star Catherine Laga’aia’s friends thought her casting news was AI
Disney’s new Moana worked at Target before being cast and thought the idea she could get the role was so “ridiculous,” she nearly didn’t audition
Brendan MorrowUSA TODAY
July 9, 2026, 5:45 p.m. ET
NEW YORK − When Catherine Laga’aia abruptly stopped showing up to school, classmates could have never possibly guessed why
The 19-year-old had just been cast in the title role of “Moana” (in theaters July 10), Disney’s live-action remake of the 2016 animated hit. Laga’aia, then 17, was sworn to secrecy and had to act as if her life hadn’t just changed when she returned to her performing arts high school. By the time her casting was announced, she had already left her home country, Australia, to work on the film
“I just disappeared,” she says. “Nobody knew where I went. The rumors were insane on what I’d been doing and where I’d gone. … I was in the hair and makeup trailer for a screen test when I got announced, and people were DMing me, being like, ‘Girl, this is AI.’ My dad’s always making stupid AI stuff, so they’re like: ‘This is really lame, Katie. This isn’t funny.’ I was like, look at the Disney account!”
“Moana,” which follows the same story of a girl journeying across the sea to save her home of Motunui, is Laga’aia’s first movie role. But she’s no stranger to the acting world: Her father, Jay Laga’aia, is also an actor (he played Captain Typho in the “Star Wars” prequels), and her brothers and sisters have been in productions of “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Hamilton” in Australia
Though Moana’s father insists she follow in his footsteps, Laga’aia’s dad was more hesitant
“He knows how ruthless this industry can be, and you’re going to get 1,000 more nos than you are yeses,” she says. “Sending your kid into that, you know they’re kind of setting themselves up for rejection.”
When Disney put out the casting call for a live-action “Moana,” Laga’aia barely had auditioning experience, let alone acting: Her resume includes a few episodes of the series “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart,” plus some commercials. “I worked at Target,” she says, joking she was “so useless at that job.” She thought it was “such a ridiculous idea” that she could get the role, she didn’t want to bother trying out
“To me, it felt like putting in for the lottery. The chances of me getting it are so poor that I’m just hurting my feelings for no reason. But my mom was adamant. She’s like, ‘You’ll never know unless you try.’ So then I had to buck up and do it.”
Laga’aia went through so many auditions, she’s hazy on the exact figure. “I change the number depending on who I’m trying to impress,” she jokes. A low point came when everything “went radio silent” during the 2023 Hollywood labor strikes, and she feared the film was dead. “I was like: ‘This is never going to happen. They’re never going to green-light this again.’ “
Among the 32,000 actresses who sent in audition tapes were Laga’aia’s own sisters. But there were no hard feelings when she got the role. “Both of them were so excited,” she says. In fact, she has been on the other side of the equation before
“There was a job we went for where we were auditioning to play my dad’s three kids. They wanted three girls, and they picked my two sisters and not me,” Laga’aia says. “They were like, ‘Sorry, you don’t look enough like your sisters.’ They cast another girl in that middle spot, and I remember that cut me deep.”
But Laga’aia is the first to acknowledge that in comparison with her sisters who auditioned, she’s “by far the worst singer,” with no experience outside of school choir. So the idea of belting iconic tunes like “How Far I’ll Go” filled her with anxiety. “I thought they would just dub me with somebody else,” she says. Initially horrified by having to listen to herself sing, she says, she burst into tears the first time one of her songs played. “Now, I’m kind of OK with it,” she says, comparing the process to “exposure therapy.”
Auli’i Cravalho, voice of the animated Moana, returns as producer on the remake. She sent Laga’aia a sweet email when she was cast, telling her they had a “sisterhood” for life
“She’s one of the main advocates to get more Pacific Islander faces, and more people of color, onto screens, and the fact that she was willing to go: ‘You know what? This is an opportunity for somebody else to have that incredible experience and exposure,’ and she was willing to take that step back and step into that [producing] role, I think that speaks to who she is,” Laga’aia says
As someone who grew up in a lively household with seven siblings, being away from home in the United States, often accompanied by just a single chaperone, could be jarring and isolating
“It was little things, like, I don’t understand how the shopping mart works,” she says. “I don’t know where to put my trolley. We drive on the other side of the road. It was having no sense of where I was and what I was doing, very similar to Moana being out on that boat.”
But if “Moana” is a journey of self-discovery for its heroine, it served the same function for Laga’aia
“There were so many things where I was like, ‘This is a hard boundary. I can’t push past this,’ ” she says. “But with time and practice, and a lot of positive reinforcement and support, I was like, ‘You know what? I’ll just push it a little bit. I’ll push a little further. OK, I’m going to push a little harder,’ until I was just kind of running through walls.”
“He feels a lot more confident,” she says. “He’s really proud of what I did, and I think now he knows that maybe I have enough ground to stand on, that maybe I can do it.”
