Sasha Calle doesn’t back down. After the 28-year-old actor was rejected from New York’s prestigious American Dramatic and Musical Academy as a teenager, she called the admissions office multiple times to argue her case.
“I was like, ‘Listen, I don’t come from much. I don’t have opportunities,’” she recalls. “You guys are a college, you help people grow. You have to allow me to grow.” The Colombian-American performer didn’t take acting too seriously before auditioning for the program (she had seen herself more as a singer), but the process lit a fire inside her. “I had this dream in my body that needed to be completed,” she tells me from her home in Los Angeles, her Great Dane, Dragon, leaving a loving trail of slobber across her arm.
Calle’s campaign paid off. After talking her way into another audition at ADMA, she performed a monologue about a singer desperate to escape home and live a bigger life. The role resonated with the actor, who was also motivated by a desire for a future she couldn’t quite picture. Money was scarce during Calle’s childhood, and her mother, who raised the actor and her younger brother alone, shuttled the family from one relative’s house to another across Florida, Massachusetts, and her native Colombia.
“From an early age, I was like, ‘I will be a performer.’ People were like, ‘Are you crazy?’” she remembers. The raw angst and desire Calle brought to her audition was sourced from a deep place. She got in.
After graduation and a Daytime Emmy-nominated turn as Lola Rosales on the soap opera The Young and the Restless, Calle was cast as Supergirl in the DC Comics film The Flash. Calle’s personal hardships coalesced to make her a force onscreen, giving her deep emotional range and an unquenchable urge to create. When she auditioned for The Flash, she understood the character innately. “She’s the new kid, out of place and misunderstood,” Calle says of Supergirl. “I remember having a moment where I was like, ‘Wow, thanks to my life and what I’ve been through, I’m able to play this character.’”
This year, Calle will appear in the eagerly awaited drama On Swift Horses alongside Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi. The film follows a couple struggling to rebuild their life after the Korean War. It’s a far cry from her humble beginnings, but Calle doesn’t have any vertigo about the experience. “I’ve always felt like this guiding light has been directing me,” she explains. “I just have to keep going.”
Jazmine Hughes is a National Magazine Award-winning writer based in Brooklyn, New York, and Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico.
MAKEUP BY Vittorio Masecchia
HAIR BY Hikaru
NAILS BY Tracy Clemens
CASTING BY Tom Macklin
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANCE BY Alizabeth Bean and Cody Rogers AND CODY ROGERS
STYLING ASSISTANCE BY Andrew McFarland, Laura Cheron Haquette, and Arianna Thode
PRODUCTION BY Giulia di Stravola
DIGITECH BY Victor Prieto
SET DESIGN BY Romain Goudinoux
ART ASSISTANCE BY Cam Lindfors
SPECIAL THANKS Studios 60
Want more of young Hollywood? Check out CULTURED's profiles of Charles Melton and Yara Shahidi. Pre-order the Art+ Film print issue here.
