Who is Ana Cruz Kayne, the half-Filipina in Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’?

This isn’t the first time for her to take part in a Hollywood offering—and interestingly, she has often taken on legal-savvy roles. Before being chief justice in Barbie, she appeared in Netflix legal drama Partner Track as an attorney. In her upcoming limited series Painkiller, she also stars as a young lawyer. 

“I always play a lawyer,” she said in an interview with The Messenger. “It might be my deep voice, I have no idea.”   

While she graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and Italian literature, she decided to step into the entertainment scene in 2007. She has since appeared in TV series Law and Order and The Bold Type as well as films like Another Earth and Little Women, among many others. 

Barbie is one of the major films she’s become part of in her acting career, and it’s only right for her to see it as the perfect opportunity to put the spotlight on her homeland and represent its people in her own ways. She now considers it “the most empowering thing” she’s ever done. 

On playing an underrepresented version of Barbie 

Kayne admittedly did not see herself in the iconic doll in her yesteryears because she had a hard time resonating with it. “I didn’t grow up playing with Barbie because she was a completely perfect blonde girl that I didn’t relate to. I grew up sort of a tomboy in a mixed-race family, and I didn’t really engage with Barbie,” she, who was born to a Filipino mother, told The Messenger.

The 33-year-old actress only got her hands on the Mattel toy for the first time before her Barbie audition—in the form of a veterinarian doll that “seemed not quite super white” and also owned a cat, just like her.

Kayne wrote her name on the Barbie item and kept it in her closet. “[My friend] was like, ‘If you get the job, you can keep the Barbie and cherish her. If you don’t, you can symbolically burn it to the ground, bury it in the forest.”

And just like how the law of attraction has worked for others, she got the part. 

Getting to play an underrepresented version of Barbie in traditional butterfly sleeves means so much for her as she’s able to represent not just her Pinay mom, but the Philippines as a whole. “I just remember crying when I tried it on because, if you want to be seen, you kind of have to speak up and tell them what that looks like because people don’t know, necessarily,” she said in an interview with JoySauce. 

For Kayne, Hollywood media still has a long way to go when it comes to Asian and Philippine representation. “It’s not that you’re not invited to the table, it’s that they don’t know. It’s a very unique experience—to so many of us—and unless we share our stories, they don’t exist.”

“Our stories aren't represented yet. You have to tell them what the mixed-Asian experience is. It's all obviously so specific because Asia is so many things, but I was constantly saying, ‘In the country that I'm from, this is our experience,’” she said. 

Like other multiracial individuals, Kayne felt like she “didn’t belong anywhere” when she was in her early 20s. This is exactly why her Barbie role matters to her more than words can say. “Getting to be a Barbie who's just mixed Asian—she's not pretending to be a completely different race—was just the most empowering thing that I've ever gotten to do in my life.” 

Kayne, after all, sees her portrayal of different roles in Hollywood as a “big responsibility.” 

“I feel the weight of it because you know, maybe this is self-centered, but I wish that I had grown up seeing Asians portrayed in the media as not stereotypical. I think my life would've been different. I think I would've stood prouder in my Filipino heritage and less ashamed,” she explained. 

“Getting to step into that unapologetically is still the thing that when I think about it, I get chills. It means everything. That's the whole point,” she continued.