On KCAL News in Los Angeles, Lana Parrilla presented “You”, a dance track on which she sings, and talked about the challenges she keeps choosing: singing despite her nerves, returning to the stage and a role in the science fiction film Atlas.
Leaning into fear
Parrilla admits she is still nervous about singing. But she has a rule: “Anything that I’m afraid of, I lean toward.” When two friends from electronic dance music invited her to record a track, she said yes, trusting their experience. For her, it is another character: the music video imagines two women from parallel worlds, inspired by Mad Max and The Matrix, who discover they love the same man.
Fans first heard her sing in the musical episode of Once Upon a Time, for which the cast trained with a leading vocal coach and she returned to dancing after fifteen years. She would love to play an athlete or a boxer one day, for the physical challenge. A singing career? She dreams about it, but feels she would first need to find her own voice instead of a character’s.
Back on stage, and into the future
She had long wanted to do theatre. During the strikes, a conversation with her friend Gloria Calderón Kellett led to a role in Kellett’s play One of the Good Ones, which she had just finished performing.
She also appears in Atlas, directed by Brad Peyton, as the mother of Jennifer Lopez’s character, in flashbacks. The film is set 150 years in the future and explores a fear many people share: artificial intelligence taking over and humanity disappearing.