by Cynthia Wang

When Tia Carrere arrived in Australia for a hectic one-week schedule of meet-and-greets and film revivals in June, she could have pleased her fans by simply sticking to a schedule of photo opportunities and autograph signings. But hitting the stage at live show venue Amphora in Melbourne, the Filipino American actress had a better idea: delivering a cabaret performance.

“I was like, ‘You know what? Instead of just doing a movie screening, why don’t I just get up and do something in a jazz club?’” she tells AsAmNews over coffee in a Sydney cafe. 

That’s an easy pivot for Carrere, whose 40-plus year career encompasses standout roles in comedy Wayne’s World (1992), sci-fi thriller True Lies (1994), action-adventure series Relic Hunter (1999-2002) and both the animated and live versions of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (2002 and 2025), along with two Grammy wins for Best Hawaiian Music Album – ’Ikena (2008) and Huana Ke Aloha (2010) in collaboration with Daniel Ho.

“It makes the opportunities present themselves,” Carrere, 58, admits to being a well-rounded entertainer. “But it’s hard because if I plan a musical tour, I’m booked out for [doing] movies. I hate to have to choose, because that would be sad.”

Growing up in Honolulu, Carrere’s first ambition involved music.

“From my first singing lesson at 11, I played everywhere,” she told People magazine in May. “Every talent contest at Kahala Mall shopping center, at the Ala Moana shopping center, at my high school, the all-boys high school, I sang everywhere.” 

A few years later, she added modeling to her portfolio. Then, in 1984, she landed a role in the coming-of-age film Aloha Summer, which was released in 1988. Just four years after that, she broke through at the box office in the 1992 comedy Wayne’s World, based on the Saturday Night Live skits featuring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar, hosts of a public-access cable show filmed in Wayne’s parents’ basement. 

“It changed the whole trajectory,” Carrere says of her future in films after playing heavy metal singer (and Wayne’s love interest) Cassandra Wong. “I mean, before that, I was a square peg fitting into a round hole and still, it was hard even afterwards. Thank goodness that Mike Myers and Bonnie and Terry Turner wrote the part specifically as this character [who] was exactly 18 to 23 [years old], Asian, spoke with a heavy Cantonese accent and rocked on stage like Pat Benatar, which is not unlike Arnel Pineda or any number of cover bands in Asia.”

She saw the impact that having someone like her cast in a blockbuster hit had on mass audiences.

“It was such a huge success, and the fact that I was a female lead in a mostly Caucasian film, it was sort of like, ‘All right, we’re in the big leagues,’” she says. “It wasn’t some niche thing. Not that Joy Luck Club was niche, but it was more the Asian people that watched the film. Wayne’s World was the hugest hit at Paramount that year.”

Although she understood the assignment in playing Cassandra, Carrere says the part could have easily gone to top non-Asian actresses such as Cameron Diaz or Drew Barrymore. Subsequently, Carrere recalls going on auditions and “[being told], ‘for this family, you don’t look like the kids,’ or, ‘oh, we’re not thinking of going ethnic with that role or Asian with that role. It was still a lot of pushing the boulder up the hill.”

Hollywood’s zeal for diversity casting would take a long time to catch up to Carrere’s confidence. 

“I always thought that I could be cast in anything,” she insists. “I was always trying like, ‘OK, if it’s written for a guy, you can rewrite it for me!’ Because in Hawaii, everybody’s mixed. So I didn’t understand being marginalized or put into a box in that way. It was very confusing to me when I first moved to L.A.” 

Carrere brought island culture to the big screen in 2002’s animated film Lilo & Stitch, where she voiced Nani, the older sister trying to raise and protect precocious Lilo (Daveigh Chase) after a family tragedy. Not only was she part of a movie with a distinctly contemporary Hawaiian storyline, but Carrere’s singing abilities contributed to one of its most poignant scenes.

“I love that they thought enough to sit down with me, [director-screenwriters] Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois,” she explains when they asked her, “‘How would you say goodbye to your sister? Is there a Hawaiian phrase?’ 

“And I said, ‘There’s that song of love and farewell that Queen Lili’uokalani had written.’ And I sang a little bit for them. Like, ‘Oh my God, that is so perfect. That’s so amazing.’ Because it has that line in English, ‘One fond embrace, until we meet again.’ It couldn’t have been more perfect. It was magic, and I was grateful that they were open to it.”

In the new, live-action version of Lilo & Stitch, which was released in May, Carrere plays Mrs. Kekoa, the social worker assigned to watch over Lilo (Maia Kealoha) and Nani (Sydney Agudong).

“There’s this natural progression,” Carrere says with a smile. “Like I was the young, messed-up girl in Nani, and now I’m the mentor helping that young, messed-up girl trying to find her way. It’s my deepening understanding of myself and what’s important to me, and what I’d like to put out in the world.”

While the original movie grew in popularity over time, the 2025 take has proved an immediate smash.

“The fact that Lilo & Stitch is looking at a billion-dollar franchise at this point pleases me to no end,” Carrere says, “because that means that there’s more work for everybody. If our movies are financially successful, Hollywood will make more.”

That includes an independent film Carrere is currently writing that she intends to shoot, direct and star in that is set in Hawaii. “It’s a tiny little indie movie about the local experience of how expensive it is to live in Hawaii,” she explains, “and everybody’s one paycheck away from falling off the bottom end of society and being priced out of paradise, like Iam Tongi said on American Idol. That really shined a light on a situation that I’ve been aware of for decades.”

In the meantime, Carrere says she has gotten a greenlight from Dan Lin, Chairman of Netflix Film, to write and shoot a TV movie about a family in Hawaii. On this and her film project, she adds, “I feel like I’m at that place where I have something that I want to say, and I have a very clear vision of what it is.”

The actress who had to leave Hawaii to find opportunities on the mainland has truly returned home.

“I went back to Hawaii recently and taught a class in cold reading,” Carrere says. “Looking around the room, a lot of these kids and young adults have been on Hawaii Five-0 and NCIS: Hawai’i. They’re working actors in Hawaii and said, ‘Oh yeah, Aunty, I, saw your movie when I was a kid,’ and stuff like that. It feels really good to know that it really is a cause and effect. They see somebody looking like themselves on screen, on stage, on television, and it’s possible in their minds. They can then go, ‘You know, I can make a living doing that, too.’”

Cynthia Wang is a former editor at People and TV Week. She is currently a freelance writer based in Sydney.

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