Lea Salonga on ‘Miss Saigon,’ ‘Aladdin’ and Supporting Her Trans Son Amid Anti-Trans Rhetoric: ‘It Makes Me Intensely Afraid and Not Just for My Child’

Tony winner Lea Salonga admits she never really thought about getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“Most of my work is in musical theater,” says Salonga, who earned international recognition for originating the role of Kim in “Miss Saigon” in 1989. “So even though musical theater does reach Los Angeles and Hollywood, it’s not something that I thought would actually happen. It’s not like the kind of Hollywood career that, say, somebody like Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn or any of those icons of the screen or television have had. This is something that I did not foresee.”

But on Friday, Salonga will become the 2,855th recipient of a Hollywood Walk of Fame star and makes history as the first Filipina to receive the honor.

While she is known as a star of the stage, Salonga has had major roles on screen, too. She was the singing voice for Princess Jasmine in “Aladdin” as well as Fa Mulan in “Mulan” and “Mulan 2.” Later this month, Salonga, who made her singing debut when she was just seven years old in her native Manila, appears in “Forgotten Island,” DreamWorks Animation’s Philippines-set fantasy adventure about childhood friends who get trapped in the mystical world of Nakali.

“It centers on my culture,” Salonga tells me over a Zoom video call earlier this week. “It centers Philippine myth and folklore. We get to share our mythological creatures with the bigger world. I don’t think it’s something that I ever thought I would have seen.”

Salonga was 17 years old when she landed “Miss Saigon” in the original West End production of the show before transferring to Broadway. She auditioned with a performance of “On My Own” from “Les Misérables” followed by “The Greatest Love of All.” After several call backs, including a trip to London, “I was told, ‘You’re in the show, but we don’t know what role we’re going to give you,’” Salonga recalled. “Never mind that at this point the only songs I was learning were the ones sung by Kim. But I was like, ‘Whatever.’ I was pre-med in college. I had a life. So if you decide you’re going to put me in the ensemble, I’ll just be like, ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’”

Salonga’s work as Kim earned her a Laurence Olivier Award and in 1991, she became the first Asian actress to win a Tony Award and the second-youngest actress to win for best performance by a leading actress in a musical.

She was still in “Miss Saigon” when she was cast in “Aladdin” in the early 90s. “Stage management and the powers that be were so kind in saying, ‘You’re we’re going to give you the night off because we want you to sound great for that recording session,’ which I really appreciated,” Salonga said. “Given that ‘Little Mermaid’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ had come out, I think they had a feeling that this was going to be huge.”

In the decades since, Salonga has starred in several Broadway musicals and released numerous albums. She frequently appears on the Manila stage.

She has also become a fierce LGBTQ+ ally and activist. Her actor and singer son Nic Chien came out as trans in 2025. “We felt that it was important for all of this to be made very public,” Salonga says. “There have been young people that have slid into his DMs and have said, ‘Thank you for what you are doing. Thank you for what you and your mom are doing because I think this is also who I am, and it’s giving me strength and inspiration.’

“My son was reading one of those letters aloud in our kitchen in Manila,” she continues. “We were both doing a show together at the time and I think he was realizing how much of an impact he was making just by being who he is.”

As for politicians who are using anti-trans rhetoric and pushing for anti-trans legislation, Salonga says, “It makes me angry and upset. It makes me intensely afraid, and not just for my own child, but for a lot of other young people who just want to live, who just want to exist and make a living for themselves and fall in love.”

But she adds, “They’re basically trying to say, ‘Look over there,’ because chances are if somebody’s telling you to look somewhere else, you start looking into their backyards. Something is happening, and they’re trying to distract. If they’re trying to, you know, take our attention away from themselves, something’s up.”