Eva Noblezada builds her characters from the ground up, from thinking of their mannerisms to their upbringing. “All of these things, you put together and mold to create this person. And you keep going.” Eva wears a TIFFANY & CO. necklace. Photographed by Harold Julian for the December 2024/January 2025 Issue of Vogue Philippines
For Broadway star Eva Noblezada, acting isn’t just about inhabiting a role but also being part of a spiritual exchange that is as old as time.
Watching Eva Noblezada’s backstage get-ready-with-me videos will tell you a few things about the theater actress: that she does her own makeup, that she listens to music to get into the right headspace, and that she might have a bottle of gin stashed somewhere. But what really comes through is that she’s an enchantingly zany, relatable ball of chaotic good. Theater can be a magical, transformative space, but Eva makes the magic accessible, her infectious energy inviting audiences into a rarified world turned real.
When we connected online, closing the 13-hour gap between New York and Manila, the United States had just elected a convicted felon as its 47th president. I ask Eva how the theater community has been processing the results, wondering if this unwanted moment has affected the energy of her immediate shows.
“There’s a lyric in The Great Gatsby that I sing, ‘Let my girl be a fool to whom it won’t occur that the choices she makes in this life are never hers.’ [With the overturning of Roe versus Wade], that was a horrible thing to sing the night after he got elected,” Eva says. “The whole audience could feel it too.” She points out that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was written a hundred years ago, yet here they are. Again.
If Eva were still performing in Hadestown, the musical retelling of Greek mythology where she originated the role of Eurydice, that song would have been “Why We Build a Wall”: ‘The wall keeps out the enemy, and we build a wall to keep us free.’
Though we seek escape at the theater, we often leave with the truths that theater, as a mirror to society, reveals.
“By the end of the show, my body might be exhausted, but my spirit feels refreshed, renewed.”
Eva is the embodiment of the American dream, with grandparents who came from the Philippines on her father’s side, and Mexico on her mother’s side. Her childhood in San Diego was soaked in the warmth of both cultures, and she moved seamlessly between Filipino and Mexican households and the feasts they would prepare. In her young eyes, everyone was family, and she just felt love. As she grew older, Eva developed a more complex appreciation of her dual heritage. She reflects, “It’s a powerful thing to grow up and become more attached to where your family is from and ask more questions about their history and form connections.”
The Noblezadas moved from San Diego to North Carolina, uprooting the seven-year-old from the comforts of her close-knit family and the California coastline. But it was in Charlotte where Eva encountered her theatrical destiny. When Eva was 10, her aunt Annette Calud (who herself had a turn as Kim in Miss Saigon in the ’90s) took Eva to New York to see The Lion King, her first Broadway show. As the giraffes, gazelles, and zebras leapt down the aisles during “Circle of Life,” Eva started to cry. “It was the most beautiful thing I had seen. I was obsessed from that moment.”
At 13, Eva landed her first role in the Charlotte Children’s Theater’s production of Aladdin, where she played a harem girl. “It was kind of inappropriate,” Eva laughs, “But I loved being a part of the theater community.” Her real breakthrough came in 2013, when she represented North Carolina at the National High School Musical Theater Awards in New York and made her Broadway stage debut in the very same theater where she watched The Lion King and discovered her calling. A casting director took note of her performance and arranged for her to audition for the West End revival of Miss Saigon. Eva was 17 years old.
Taking on the role of Kim, Eva followed in the path that Lea Salonga carved 25 years earlier. But while the teenaged Lea might not have predicted a Tony-awarded future prior to auditioning for Cameron Mackintosh, Eva was more than ready to take the leap. “I already knew what I was. I just needed someone to give me a break, like my big break.” Growing up on Disney films, Eva looked up to Lea as the voice of Jasmine and Mulan, and her being Filipino gave Eva the permission to dream. The two performers only met well into Eva’s West End run. “It cemented my feeling of this is where I’m supposed to be,” Eva says of the memorable introduction to her idol.
The experience of being part of Miss Saigon in 2015 was eye-opening for the young thespian. As a 17-year-old given a significant leading role, she was concentrating on doing her job as best she could. Though as time went by and the more she began to understand her role, the more uncomfortable she felt. On the set of predominantly Asian actors, instances of casual racism abounded. Eva recalls when the director instructed the actors in the background of one scene to “strike a deal in Vietnamese.” The actor, who was Filipino American, informed the director that they don’t speak Vietnamese. “Well, you know, Asian chatter,” the director replied. Fact: for far too long, the wedding song in Miss Saigon consisted of gibberish words and were only changed to real Vietnamese lyrics when the revival was brought to Broadway in 2017.
It was during the US production that the problematic legacy of Miss Saigon began to induce feelings of guilt. What was supposed to be a dream job revealed itself to be part of a larger discourse on Asian representation. As an Asian performer, Eva felt a responsibility to portray Asian characters with dignity, free from sexist and racist stereotypes. Yet she also questioned how much influence she had in her role within such an established production. Today, she can look back on the journey and say she has gained more wisdom as a woman: “I know what my power is, and it continues to grow.”
In Diane Paragas’ acclaimed 2019 film Yellow Rose, Eva made her film debut as an undocumented Filipino teen living in Texas who dreams of becoming a country musician. Her world is turned upside down when her mother is taken by ICE and faces deportation. It was one of the first films of its kind, where a Filipino lead character is played by a Filipino, and it was important for Eva to be the representation she longed for in her youth.
After her five-year run in the fan-favorite, Tony-award sweeping Hadestown, Eva was announced as Daisy in the new staging of The Great Gatsby. For Eva, the real challenge was embodying Daisy’s innate confidence in her beauty. The glamorous role was a deliberate departure from her previous work, especially after years of being covered in dirt and “going to hell eight times a week.”
“Kim and Eurydice, they’re not the same, but they have a lot of similar things about their world and how they show up in their world,” Eva says. Daisy, on the other hand, is fun to play, especially since she’s someone Eva personally dislikes. “As a people pleaser, I sometimes feel like I have to make the audience happy, like I want to make sure they like my character,” she explains. “But no—your character is the character and has nothing to do with if you like them or not. That was an interesting hurdle I wasn’t expecting to jump over when I first started really diving into Daisy Buchanan as a person.”
Eva built Daisy’s character from the ground up, exploring everything from her period-specific mannerisms to her status and privileged upbringing. “All of these things, you put together and mold to create this person. And you keep going, and I like to go as far as the perfume that I wear.” Daisy wears Delina by Parfums de Marly, its feminine fragrance and powder pink bottle a perfect match with the character’s decadent world. The hellbound Eurydice, meanwhile, sprayed herself with “regret” (as Eva joked in one of her backstage vlogs).
As far and as deep as she goes with character-building, Eva has learned how to set boundaries since playing Kim. Eva would come home after a Miss Saigon performance emotionally drained, crying and feeling hopeless. She realized that when she leaves the theater, it has to be Eva. Some techniques that have helped her decompress are to listen to music immediately after the show, or to talk aloud about normal things while removing her makeup, “so that my body knows we’re not in the show anymore.” It took a lot of practice, and she didn’t have any guidance. “It was also a great way of showing up for myself, being my own teacher in those moments where I was feeling hopeless and depressed and just very dark,” she says. “I just had to do things that were the opposite, things that were light and inspiring.”
Eva draws from the transformative power of theater to change lives, including her own. Steeped in history and the legacy of actors that came before her, the theater is a place where alchemy happens every day. “Even if I’m feeling anxious, the second I go into my character and I begin that transformation, I use that energy and transform that into part of my character, my voice, or the way that I move,” she says. “By the end of the show, my body might be exhausted, but my spirit feels refreshed, renewed.”
For the 28-year-old, acting isn’t merely about inhabiting a role, but about participating in a spiritual exchange that is as old as time, when people sat around a fire and told stories in the dark, stories that ignited the imagination and strengthened kinship. Even in times like these—especially in times like these—we need to maintain those connections, which remind us of our humanity, and enter into transformation, which reveal to us our divinity.
By AUDREY CARPIO. Photographs by HAROLD JULIAN. Styling by SUTHEE RITTHAWORN. Creative Direction by JANN PASCUA. Beauty Editor: JOYCE OREÑA. Makeup: Vanessa Li. Hair: Ryuta Sayama. Set Stylist: Bethany Yeap. Executive Producer: Anz Hizon. Producer: Jean Jarvis. Beauty Writer: Bianca Custodio. Set Stylist’s Assistant: Becca Yeap. Stylist’s Assistant: Janden James. Hairstylist’s Assistant: Keina Nakagawa. Production Coordinator: Devon Jarvis.
