For most of her life, Auliʻi Cravalho — the queer actress who rocketed to fame at age 16 as the titular lead of the 2016 Disney film Moana — has eaten the same dinner for both Thanksgiving and Christmas as a tradition with her mother.

"I grew up in a single-parent household. Love my mom a lot. We grew up on food stamps. So…my favorite holiday meal…is we get a Costco rotisserie chicken," she shares. They would also “get a box each of Stove Top stuffing. I don't want nobody's homemade stuffing, I want Stove Top stuffing that comes out of the box. And then, we get canned cranberry sauce. I don't want nobody's homemade cranberry sauce,"

"I make a really good mashed potato. Those are homemade," she adds after a moment. "Do not, I know that this goes against everything else I've said about Thanksgiving meals, but do not give me mashed potatoes out of a box."

This year, things were a little different. Cravalho has moved from her home state of Hawaii to New York City with her partner as well as her best friend (something she and her best friend have been manifesting since ninth grade). There, she performs on Broadway in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. It's a whole new world for the Disney star, along with new holiday traditions.

"My mom isn't here this time, so I am living with roommates, which means I think I have to cook. I think I actually have to pick up a spoon," she laughs. "I think we're trying to make a turkey. I don't want to make a turkey. It's going to come out dry, we all know it. Why do we do this to ourselves?"

It's fitting that she's thousands of miles from home making new traditions and communities, as that's exactly what the seafaring princess that she originated almost a decade ago, Moana, is doing in the new sequel Moana 2, in theaters now.

In Moana 2, the titular character has grown up, something Disney princesses are rarely allowed to do. She's three years older, now a master wayfarer looking to her future, and "she still doesn't have a boyfriend, thank you very much, and she's fine without one," the Out100 honoree, who came out as queer in 2020, says.

"So if our last film was about connecting with the past, this film is about connecting with the future and discovering if there are more people out there," she says. "And this is a theme that is directly connected to one of real life in that voyaging and navigating by the stars is an Indigenous knowledge that my people of the Pacific have had and have thankfully brought back, but it was almost lost for a period of time. It's why we [in the film] worked so closely with the Polynesian Voyaging Society and Nainoa Thompson who really helped with that resurgence in real life."

"So I think it's the coolest thing ever that we get to have a film that continues to perpetuate the importance of looking back, of looking at our past, and looking at how incredible our Indigenous specific cultures are," she continues. "And to be a part of the next generation of young heroes and young heroines, that feeling is incredible. And truly, in the 10 years, I suppose eight since 2016, that's almost a whole generation, almost a whole generation of people or kids and families who have seen Moana, and that ripple effect, those waves just keep going and I feel really, really proud."

David Urbanke

Cravalho is also proud of another role this year, Janis in Mean Girls, who has been a queer icon since the original 2004 film, but was able to be canonically queer in the new movie musical version starring Reneé Rapp as Regina George.

"Not that I had really any control over how much queerness would come out of me in that role, it just happened, which is always how it happens in every role I touch," she says.

"It felt great. Janis is for the theater kids. She's for the band freaks, she's for the art kids. If you were like me in high school, she's also for the stoners. You know what I mean?" she smiles. "She's for all the people who didn't fit into a category in high school. And if you resonate with Janis when you're a young person, that means that you have 'it.' You know that golden 'it' factor that we talk about all the time? You have it, and what a blessing that is."

"And I loved being able to belt 'I'd Rather Be Me.' I loved using all of our middle fingers that we possibly could to maintain our PG-13 rating, I almost got us into an R category with how many I was flipping up there. It was so much fun," she says. "I cut my hair, I dyed it green. And then, after we had wrapped, I shaved my head as well because I felt so alive."

Shaving her hair was a major personal step for Cravalho, and she credits playing the role of Janis with getting her in touch with "an inner grit that I hadn't felt before."

"I loved it also, to lose my pretty privilege, to understand what it's like to just not be seen as Auliʻi. To lose what other people think that I should look like was really important, especially as I live in this age of social media, people have real opinions about it, and that's fine," she says. "And I've come out on the other side with a little more hair on my head and no love lost. So I also got to go on my own journey. I didn't have a typical graduation story because I was still working on Moana at the time, and then, I went straight into showbiz, so to go back to that high school and to up was great. I love playing Janis."

David Urbanke

But the 24-year-old actress isn't a teen anymore, and wants to start playing more complex adult roles, something she's doing in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club on Broadway, where she plays the iconic role of Sally Bowles, made famous by Liza Minnelli, who won an Oscar for her performance in the 1972 film.

In the musical, set in 1920s Berlin, audiences are a part of the play, taking the role of the patrons of the Kit Kat Club. At first, the play is gaudy, tawdry, and fun. But things quickly turn dark as the Nazis rise to power. It's been especially powerful as the themes of being complacent during the rise of fascism seem to be getting more relevant every day.

"Anything that you want goes in the Kit Kat Club," Cravalho teases. "And so, it is very easy to be complicit in the show of Cabaret until the second act comes around and you recognize, 'oh, oh,' and you get a gut punch. And I think that's what great theater does, is it rips you open and it reveals a mirror. And I feel this show is incredibly timely, but it's always been timely. And I think that's the sad truth of it. So coming to this show and leaving with a frog in your throat is perhaps the best thing that we can do."

She especially credits her costar Adam Lambert, who plays the Emcee and is both queer and Jewish, for making the play hit extra hard right now.

"As humans, when we are confronted with things that are uncomfortable, as our audience does, sometimes they laugh and sometimes our audience laughs at very inappropriate times. And it is, Adam, this is not scripted, this is not something that our director told him to do, but he'll stare at that audience member and let them recognize that I heard you, that I'm holding you with my gaze, almost like a checks and balances right there in the theater. And that's been so powerful to see each one of my cast members take on the responsibility of that story."

David Urbanke

Cravalho herself can relate as a young, queer woman — she's the youngest Sally ever on Broadway and the first Asian American and Pacific Islander to play the role there. And she's thankful that she isn't alone.

"I'm really grateful also that, not only do we have cast members on stage who are of different gender identities and different sexualities, but we also have that in our stage management team," she says. "And that makes it feel also like a safe space. So after the election, we all came together and that alone, that breath, that communal breath that we got to take, the understanding of the responsibility that we had ahead, that was understood by all."

That community has been more important than ever since the election, when Donald Trump was elected to return to the American presidency on a far-right platform. Cravalho has found comfort in the people who love and support her.

"I called my mom two days in a row. We spoke four hours each time," she says about how she took care of herself after election night. "So just connecting with my family has been nice. Hearing about the small problems, like my cat threw up on the bed. Focusing on the things that I can change has been very helpful because when I'm not, I'm literally in my New York Times app." she says. "So it's been interesting, but I'm also really grateful to have projects like Moana, which is so bright and so lovely, and it's such a passion project of mine, but also Cabaret, which is also on its own themes of fascism and sexism. And even with my character, Sally Bowles, a young woman who is looking to have agency over her own body and her own decisions. Having outlets in both directions has been a welcome distraction."

David Urbanke

Moana has also been a safe harbor, as the character is able to embark on her journey with support of loved ones around her. In Moana 2, the wayfarer goes out on the ocean again, but this time brings along a crew to help her. While Moana's crew includes the tinkerer Loto, farmer Kele, Moni the storyteller, and of course, demigod Maui, Cravalho's own crew includes her mother, queer community, partner, best friend, and her cat Rocco.

"You can do things alone, but the celebration is so much greater when you find chosen family who will celebrate you," she says. "And I found that in real life, and I've managed to find that also in my characters that I've played, and Moana is no exception in that. In the first film, she really needed to go on this journey alone to find her inner strength, to realize that she can do it."

Cravalho has found her own inner strength, and is excited to show it off in future projects, saying she wants to play "young women who are written with smarts, which chutzpah, with grit, with not perfection in mind" and to "take on roles that I don't have to worry about being pretty in."

"So next, I'm really looking forward to getting into action. I'm really looking forward to playing a villain," she says. "I cannot wait to be in a film all sweet and ingenue and then sike, I got you, and I turn out to be the villain. I just want to do things that are different and that showcase all these different facets of myself."

She's also going to continue to proudly be herself, something that hasn't always been easy in such a public spotlight.

"The fact that the ripple effect of Moana has been so important as a young role model for kids and teens alike, I used to think of it as more of a burden on my shoulders that I needed to represent my culture everywhere that I went," she says. "But I realized that by simply being here, by being alive, by continuing to take on roles that challenge me, by continuing to date women, by being authentically myself, that that alone inspires people to do the same, which as a 24-year-old is crazy, by the way, but it's also like what a blessing, what a strange time to be alive."

David Urbanke

When asked about reports that Disney leadership pushed to make Riley, the main character in another recent movie, Inside Out 2, seem "less gay," Cravalho said she's proud that queer kids could see themselves in characters like Riley and Moana.

"I think films are reflective of their times, and Moana is a very special character in that we knew we needed a strong, young woman who didn't need a love interest to complete her story. She needed to grab a demigod by the ear and said, 'You will fix what you messed up.'" she says.

"And I think that if I had a film like Inside Out growing up, I would've been a lot more in touch with my emotions, I would've been a lot more in touch with understanding myself," she continues. "And it's important to have all kinds of characters on screen, not just the ones that fit into a mold, because no one fits perfectly into a mold. No one wants to watch a 'perfect,' quote-unquote, person on screen, they're not interesting.

"Self-growth is interesting. Queerness is beautiful," she says. "As a young Hawaiian, also, we have such a different take on gender like being māhū or transgender, these are people to be respected and revered."

She's also working on making her own representation, the kind she wants to see.

"I really look forward to my role as an executive producer and producing. And I have another film that's coming out that I'm an associate producer on," she says. "I am not looking for the really big titles, I'm looking to learn, and only by learning will I then be able to create my own films. I've been grateful for the safe spaces like Cabaret, like Crush, like Mean Girls that have allowed me to find these characters. And it's alright if you don't want to watch a film that has things that you don't agree with, but that doesn't mean that we'll stop making them."

Moana 2 is playing in theaters, and Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club is now on Broadway.

Photographer: David Urbanke @davidurbanke
Hair: Rheanne White @rheannewhite
Make-up: Kirin Bhatty @kirinstagram
Styling: Jessica Paster @highheelprncess