‘A U.N. Inside of Me’

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Film and television actor Ana Cruz Kayne ’06 may be increasingly recognizable since her recent stint playing Supreme Court Justice Barbie in the 2023 movie. But she has been acting since early in her Connecticut childhood, a penchant that continued straight through her time at Barnard.

“When I was maybe 6 or 7, my mom had my oldest brother in some community theatre production of The King and I, and she just pushed me up on the stage” during auditions, Kayne recalls. “I loved it. I loved all aspects of it, and I think it was very suited to my personality as I continued to grow up.”

That personality was forged in a uniquely multicultural household. Her father is an endocrinologist of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. He and her mom — a Catholic first-generation immigrant from the Philippines — met as college undergraduates. Kayne and her two older brothers grew up steeped in both sets of traditions. Her eldest brother, Michael Cruz Kayne — now a writer at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert — was bar mitzvahed atop the ancient mountain fortress Masada in Israel. Kayne herself has fond memories of visiting Lourdes, France, one of Catholicism’s most prominent pilgrimage sites, with her grandmother.

“There’s no mentorship for what it means to grow up with such a diverse background,” she says. “It’s like a U.N. inside of me.”

Kayne’s close-knit family survived a series of tragedies that she was able to process through her acting. Shortly before her King and I audition, the family home burned down, Kayne said, uprooting them for the months it took to rebuild. A few years later, her middle brother was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. The bone cancer “was basically the star of our family show until I left for college,” Kayne says. (He survived the ordeal.) Acting “took me out of the immediacy of my brother’s illness, of moving houses. It was this constant thing that as a child felt uniquely for me.”

At Barnard, where Kayne majored in psychology and Italian literature, she continued to act in at least one production every semester. She appeared alongside Barbie co-star Kate McKinnon CC’06 in a Barnard Theatre Department production of Caryl Churchill’s play The Skriker and with Barbie director Greta Gerwig ’06 in the King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe’s 2004 production of The Tempest.

“It was fun and weird and great,” reminisced Gerwig, who emailed her memories the morning after attending the Oscars. “I just always knew she [Kayne] was terrific. She had such command of the language but made it seem easy and effortless and funny.” The friends first worked together professionally on Gerwig’s 2019 remake of Little Women, in which Kayne, true to form, played an actor in a Shakespeare play.

“I had wanted to find something bigger that we could do, and the wildness of Barbie, with its ‘multiplicity of Barbie,’ felt like the perfect fit,” Gerwig says.

That deliberately expansive redefinition of Barbie — historically the buxom blonde target of endless feminist critiques — gave Kayne the opportunity to showcase her culture. In the film’s final scene, Kayne wears a terno, a traditional Filipina dress with distinctly structured butterfly sleeves.

“To get to sit there as a Filipino and say, ‘No, I’m representing a very specific nation, a very specific culture,’ it just means everything to me,” she told Vogue Philippines. “It was a triumph for me in my journey as an artist,” she later added.

Post-Barbie, Kayne’s star has continued to rise; she played an attorney in the Netflix miniseries Painkiller, and she is writing several scripts that draw on her self-described “multi-culti” upbringing.

But that all came later. Before Barbie’s worldwide release. And before the film gained a larger sociocultural significance and earned $1.4 billion at the box office, making an irrefutable argument for more investment in movies by and about women. Back in 2022, it was a few gals reuniting in London on the pinkest movie set that ever existed.

“When I saw Kate [McKinnon] come in, it was like you see water in the desert,” Kayne says. “You show up vulnerable and hope everyone loves you, and then you see someone you’ve known since you were a child. It’s so special to have had these long histories with these incredible artists.”

The feelings were mutual.

“Having her on set nearly every day as one of the Barbies was perfectly dreamy,” Gerwig said. “She was the person I’ve always known her to be — wildly talented, uproariously funny, deeply kind, and willing to try anything. It’s all I could ever want from an actor, and I am very blessed that she is also my best friend of 20-plus years.”

Photo by Gareth Cattermole / Getty Images