Meet Lauren Curet | Actress, Writer, Opera Singer, & mostly, a New Yorker in LA

We had the good fortune of connecting with Lauren Curet and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Lauren, where are your from? We’d love to hear about how your background has played a role in who you are today?
I have this fake drinking game I play with my friends that goes: “Whenever Lauren talks about growing up in New York, take a shot”. I think the past three years of my life in LA have lived up to that sentiment because whenever I meet someone new or someone asks me to talk about myself in an audition, the first thing I mention is that “I am a New Yorker.” In fact, The first sentence of all my bios when I perform is, “Lauren Curet is an actress, writer, opera singer, and most importantly, a New Yorker”. So, when I hear the question, “Where are you from and how did your upbringing impact who you are today?” I knew that I had to answer it because I wouldn’t be the person I am if I didn’t grow up in New York.
I was raised in a small yellow house in Queens, New York by two immigrant parents and my two older brothers, Michael and Steven. My mom was a paraprofessional at a public school and my dad was an engineer at a hospital. When you’re a child of immigrants, you gain a sudden awareness of how the world works. I knew I had to work ten times harder because I wasn’t rich, I didn’t have connections, and most importantly, I wasn’t just Latina or just Indian– I was both. When my parents came to New York, they weren’t treated fairly and oftentimes racism would follow them wherever they went so, they made a vow to Americanize their children so that my siblings and I could feel like we had a fighting chance of fitting in but, deep down, I never felt like I was on solid ground. I didn’t speak Spanish and I didn’t know all of SKR’s filmography. So, my culture growing up was the concrete jungle.
I had no choice but to have a strong work ethic because my parents were constantly working. I woke up early in the morning to go to before-school programs because my mom had to prepare a classroom and I went to after school programs because my brothers were only teenagers when I was little which meant that I had to wait for someone to pick me up. But our lives turned upside down when I was 5-years-old. The story goes that there was an open call for a commercial in the mall, I saw a stage and I immediately learned all the lines to the commercial and performed it for the audience. From then on, I was hooked. This was great news for my parents because I was an overactive child, constantly bouncing off the walls, and BOY, COULD I TALK FOR HOURS. This was partly my dad’s fault because he would sit and watch old movies with me– the ones that starred Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, and our personal favorite, Marlon Brando.
I’m lucky. My family has always been supportive of my acting career. My brothers actually found my first agent for me, who I still keep in contact with! They helped my mom write my first acting resume. So, at the ripe age of 5-years-old, I was auditioning like a professional, managed by Funny Face Talent, working on sets, and taking acting classes from the greats like Craig Lechner and Barry Kolker. I learned how to compartmentalize my feelings and create a work-life balance. I would get my homework done on the subway on the way to an audition or on the bus on the way to dance class. There would be tutors on sets so that I could keep up with my schoolwork. I even had this ongoing feud with my middle school principal for all the days of school I had to miss to be on set which swiftly ended when she received her copy of Scholastic Magazine one month and I was on the cover of it.
But acting is still an expensive industry. I owe everything to my parents and my brothers because they truly sacrificed everything for me to be able to act. My mom spent every weekend of my life up until my junior year of high school taking me everywhere. She saved up money so that we could afford my headshots, comp cards, and resumes. Many acting programs in New York cost an extreme amount of money, but my mom found all the low-cost or free acting programs like City Lights Youth Theater, Kidz Theater, and the Bloomingdale’s School of Music. She never wanted me to feel like I wasn’t able to do the thing that I loved so I made it my life’s mission to be successful and keep working as hard as humanly possible so that all their sacrifices were worth something. And my brothers? Every year for Christmas, they would save up their money so that my parents and I can go see a Broadway show… They never came with us because they were only able to afford three tickets. So, when I reached high school, everyone started seeing their work come to fruition– I attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia School of the Music & Art and Performing Arts, also known as “The Fame School” from my dad and I’s favorite go-to movie, “Fame!”.
But the secret that I hold to this day was that I ended up quitting acting and stopped taking dance class when I started high school because I didn’t think I was good enough anymore. I had gained weight. I wasn’t “cute” anymore. Little by little, I started to lose my love of the craft and started to see the superficial side of the industry. In high school, I was surrounded by ballerinas that looked effortlessly perfect, actors who had already performed on Broadway, and singers whose parents played in the NY Philharmonic.God, Timothee Chalamet was in the grade above me! Meanwhile, I was awkward and insecure but driven to find a path. I thought I was “destined” to be something amazing so I decided to invest all my time in being the best opera singer that has ever lived so, at 16-years-old, I got into The Juilliard School’s Pre-College Division for Classical Voice. And for college, I went to Manhattan School of Music for Classical Voice for both my Bachelor’s and Master’s. But when COVID came, I quit opera. While all my friends were taking Zoom voice lessons, learning how to sing with face masks on, and contuining to get better, I found myself in this profound depression that I kept to myself. It’s glamorous being able to say that I grew up in New York, that I started working when I was 5, that I went to all these fancy schools but the truth was that I never felt like I was good enough and that ate me up inside. I was never the best in my schools. I was this underdog who begged to be noticed. When you are in the most competitive city in the world, at some of the most comeptitive schools in the country, you have two choices: sink into the despair of knowing that you may never be “enough” or rise to the occassion. Usually, I would rise to the occassion because I’m a New Yorker, it’s what we do, but after years of running, I cracked under the pressure. I even have this memory loop of hearing my college voice teacher yell out at me, “You deserve nothing!” after I had a mental breakdown in her studio expressing that I should be considered for a role in my college’s opera because I had done such good work in the chorus. All my life I had been an amazing chorus girl and just once, I wanted to be seen as something more than my potential. All I have ever wanted was to be the best but when the world stopped, I realized that I had nothing to show for it- just the times I begged for validation.
Leaving college felt like a relief. In the solitude of lockdown, I thought about the words of a pianist who I would frequently confide in, the spectacular Travis Bloom, who told me, “Your best singing will happen when you leave college because you won’t be singing for anyone else but yourself.” In my quest to be perfect, I lost myself. Being at home with my parents, I felt like a little kid again. We watched old movies. I watched my newborn newphew learn to walk and regained my imagination through playing with him. My mom and I went on long philisophical walks in the park together (masked of course). Little by little, remnants of my past life started to form.
In 2020, there was a YouTube channel called Unus Annus created by Markiplier and Ethan Nestor. The point of the channel was that every day for an entire year they would upload a new video and at the end of the year, they would delete the channel and all the videos. I was a person who had watched their channel religiously but there was one video in particular that I remember. The catalyst for this huge change. It was a short film that they had made in an abandoned house that they had rented out. Each scene depicted a different stage of grief and grappling with the fact that soon they would be out of time. A cascade of emotions filled my soul when I watched it. I realized for the first time that I had given up on my dream… That I let the little girl who wanted to be a Hollywood actress but also a Broadway star down. I wasn’t even 25-years-old yet but the quarter-life crisis hit me like a ton of bricks. I grew up in the city where dreams come true, the land of opportunities, and yet here I was a day later watching “Paw Patrol” with my 1-year-old nephew trying to piece together what I wanted from this life. I couldn’t help but wonder, “Did I really come this far to only get this far?”
Being from New York, I’ve seen the city all the seasons: Christmastime, New Year’s Eve, Autumn but, I’ve also seen it on 9/11, during COVID, during Hurricane Sandy, the Mayor Bloomberg years, and the rise and fall of Bill DeBlasio to name a few. Rebuilding after devastation is what New York does best (outside of bagels, pizza, baconeggandcheeses.. just to name a few because NYC is amazing at so many things). When you grow up around a city constantly in chaos, it begins to feel normal. Learning how to bounce back from anything becomes a second instinct. So, when the world slowly started to open back up, I made the hardest decision I have ever had to make- leave. People leave their hometowns all the time to pursue their dreams in New York but I knew that if I was going to be a Hollywood actress then I had to go to Hollywood. I always wanted to study at Stella Adler but now I was able to study at Stella Adler in Los Angeles. It’s through that New York coraje that propelled my journey to Los Angeles.
My soul is a city girl. It never gives up. It also, rarely sleeps. Because of this, I ended up getting a second Master’s Degree from Stella Adler’s Art of Acting Studio in Los Angeles. I am a proud Equity Actor, living in Los Angeles, and doing an interview with Shoutout LA… and yes, I do sing for fun.
The person I am today is like a snowball turning into an avalanche, an accumulation of a million little things that perfectly crafted the anxiety-ridden human that I am today. The city was a main character in my life story. Through my adventures on the train with my mom, I learned a new appreciation for people, different cultures, and for myself. I think growing up in one of the largest cities in the world, forced me to open my eyes to the good, bad, and the ugly parts of life. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how I learned about rejection early on in life– as mentioned earlier, almost everywhere I went, there was some form of competition so I had to learn how to make myself stand out as much as possible. My mom, to this day, reminds me that “whatever is meant to be, will be” so I shouldn’t get too attached or disappointed if something doesn’t work out or if I don’t book a role. Or how when you grow up in a city, you must grow up fast– I started getting catcalled and had to learn how to talk back, ignore, or avert dangerous figures on the train when I was around 13-years-old. I’ll never forget being a young teenager on the train and a drug addict telling me that I looked like his ex-girlfriend, scarily reaching into his backpack, and me being saved from the craziness by my best-friend at the time, Asabea. But the city was also the greatest gift. I could be having an awful day but it would be saved by the view of the Empire State Building while standing in Bryant Park. In college, I would go on these long walks from Columbia University all the way to 42nd street and simply breathe in the city. I was constantly inspired by the people. I was surrounded by art…I always knew that my worst day was someone’s best day. NYC has been and will always be my dream– I can’t wait for the day that I return home to prepare for a Broadway role.
Living in LA now, I still can’t drive because I’ve never had to, but inside me I have this rich life filled with running races in Central Park, singing Christmas Carols in Columbus Circle, auditioning at Pearl Studios, going on adventures with my older brother, and watching “The Nanny” with my mom in a yellow house on the edge of Queens. Now, I’m creating new memories like seeing a show at The Geffen Playhouse or eating ice cream at Wunderlust or hiking Runyon Canyon with my roommate.
I think I am the best version of myself today because of the life that I have lived thus far. I am a hard-worker because of my parents, a fighter because of my brothers, and resilient because of New York. I think the three of these forces put a light in me that like the Big Apple, never sleeps.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I feel like if you throw a stone in any direction in LA, you’ll find a multi-hyphenate simply trying to get their name out there. I am no exception. I never saw myself as special– I knew I was different because a lot of times I was the only person that looked like me in a room. I started acting in the year 2000 where the only ways to describe me was “ethnically ambiguous” or “perfect for commercial” which, over 20-years-later, is still true. I started acting when I was 5-years-old but I became a serious actor-writer, my first hyphen, when I was 13-years-old and I joined a group called “Girl Power: Voices of A Generation”– a collaborative of young women who wrote about their experiences growing up in New York. My first piece was about eating disorders and how I felt like the media was trying to make me hate my body. Not only was that monologue published but I was able to perform it at the United Nations. Since then, I wanted to create and perform pieces that were deeply personal to me but also about the challenges I was facing in my daily life whether it is a one-act about the #MeToo movement or a solo show about my life in the opera world. My goal is to eventually find a way to merge all my artistic aspects together: writing, opera, and acting (bonus points if I can dance too!)
I started singing opera when I was a teenager. I have always wanted to be on Broadway and sing on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House and I knew that the only way to do it was to be an amazing singer. Because my family was on a consistent shoe-string budget, I knew that the only way I could get to someplace like Juilliard, which was one of my dream schools, the other being Stella Adler, was to work as hard as humanly possible to prove that I was worthy of being in such a prestigious space and also to write an amazing scholarship essay so that I could afford to attend. I will say that I am extremely blessed to have the education that I have. I do not take the schools that I went to lightly. I know that it is a privilege to attend a high school like LaGuardia or sing Cendrillion under the direction of Catherine Malfitano. The schools that I have attended certainly helped get me towards big life changing moments like performing my first Zerlina in “Don Giovanni” in Italy or being the first woman of color to sing Blanche in the Italian translation of “Dialogues of the Carmelites” but, like my instructor Jane has always said, “It comes at a cost.”
My journey has not been an easy one. Oftentimes when I’m in a deep depressive slump, someone will hear me say, “I didn’t get this far to only get this far.” I always tell people that there are two challenges that I have faced in this life: my ACL surgery in 2018 and my decision to move to Los Angeles. In 2020, my brother, Michael, was working at a hospital in New York. When COVID hit, that meant that I was unable to see my brother until there was a vaccine. Suddenly, I realized how short life was. I was in constant fear that I was going to lose my older brother. I knew that I didn’t want my loved ones to see me as a woman who had given up. In my college life, I was told multiple times to only pick one discipline– I could either learn how to sing or give up and pursue acting. Now, here I was living back home with my parents, not knowing what I wanted to do next, completely isolated from the world, and sitting face to face with my future. It was during that year that I realized that in my ambition to become the best opera singer that ever lived, I had given up on my dream to become a writer and an actress but I had also given up on myself. Thus began my journey to Los Angeles.
A common question I get is: Why didn’t you stay in New York?
And let me be honest with you, yes, if I had stayed in New York my life would be easier. I wouldn’t have to pay rent or figure out the LA bus system. I wouldn’t have to buy my own groceries or actively search for a basic-beginner adult ballet class. But, I wouldn’t have learned the value of being an artist. In order to be an artist, I believe that you have to live and risk putting yourself out of your comfort zone. I didn’t intend to come to LA and become an overnight sensation or to become an influencer– I came to LA because it had always been my dream to be an LA actor. And I’ll be honest, some days, it’s hard. There were days in my first year in LA that I didn’t think I would make it… I almost didn’t make it. I think the hardest thing I’ve had to deal with isn’t auditioning but the little things like living paycheck to paycheck or trying to buy groceries or trying to have a healthy work life balance or working through my depression, which I am still figuring out. One of the biggest thing I’ve learned throughout this journey is that even if my fridge is empty and I have no idea what I’m going to do next, that even when it feels like the world is falling apart, I can’t forget that I am still living the dream. It is a privilege to be able to pursue acting. It is a privilege to live in Los Angeles and everyday I get to live out this beautiful journey that so many people dream of. Growing up a child actor and attending these fancy schools looks glamorous but it is filled with a competitive nature that I wasn’t capable of sustaining when I was in my late teens-early 20’s. I always thought that in order to be loved I had to do something spectacular– even when I wasn’t performing, I was running 10Ks and marathons so that my life was filled with some extreme win to prove that I was worthy of being accepted. In fact, it wasn’t until I moved out to LA and attended the Art of Acting Studio that I learned how to remove myself from the toxic cycle of comparing myself to other people and learned how to compete with just myself. At AOA, the core lesson is that growth as an actor is synonymous with growth as a human being. I think my growth over my years of studying was that I learned that I am enough simply because I’m alive and that being alive in itself, is a gift. If there is anything I am most proud of in my career, it isn’t being the 2023 Hollywood Fringe Festival Scholarship Recipient or performing in Italy or originating the role of Jessica Contreras in “A Woman Named Gloria”, it’s learning how to be confident within my craft and how to love myself no matter what– to keep going even when life feels like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.
My story could’ve ended in my first year of being out in LA but because of my amazing community, I’m still here and you can bet that there will be a play written about it.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
OKAY,
Day One– I would get coffee at Eyes Peeled Coffee on S. Robertson to start and then get a Saucy Egg Muffin at Millcross Coffee in Culver City. From there, I would make sure that they would parooze downtown Culver City, walk down to Syd Kronenthal Park to lie down in the grass and enjoy the quiet, go for a hike at the Baldwin Hills Scenic overlook, and then take a trip to WeHo in the evening and party at The Bayou.
Day Two– Obviously, this is our Beverly Hills day so I would say start the day at Beverly Hills Bagel with coffee from Philz Coffee across the street. Go to Color Me Mine which is also on that street (now you have a keepsake). Take a trip down to Rodeo Drive then from there, I would go to the Culver City Mall– maybe see a movie. After that, I would get dinner at KazuNori on Wilshire Blvd. For dessert, I highly recommend eating the absolute best cookies in Los Angeles at Beverly Hills Cookies.
Day Three– I would see this as our “commercial” LA day to see the landmarks. Breakfast and coffee at Breakaway Coffee in Culver City is a must! From there, I would go to the Grove because it is the cutest mall that feels like it’s own city and there’s a store in the marketplace where you can get a pickle flight! Then we’re going to visit Hollywood. You have to see the Walk of Fame. You need to have a meal at Formosa Cafe. Griffith Park and the Griffith Observatory is an absolute must because they’re iconic and of course, you have to see the Hollywood Sign.
Day Four– So, I came to LA in 2018 to attend LASongfest at The Colburn School, this day would be an homage to the adventures I had that summer. Some of my favorite places in Downtown LA are the most popular places in LA. I love the Last Bookstore. I have a Complete Works of Shakespeare that I brought from there that was $5! I think everyone should see the Infinity Room at The Broad Museum at least once in their life. Go to the Walt Disney Concert Hall and bask in its beauty. Dinner at Grand Central Market. End the evening supporting Casa 0101 Theater in Boyle Heights because they always have wonderful shows there and it’s owned by the remarkable Josefina Lopez.
Day Five- I saved the best day for last! Start your day by taking a Nolan Z. class at Barry’s Bootcamp in WeHo. Breakfast at The Lazy Daisy Cafe in Westwood. Spend the day seeing a show at The Geffen Playhouse– get there early so that you can go to their bar and sit on their patio. They have a beautiful fountain, hummingbirds, and a garden, it’s a perfect place to take an Instagram-worthy photo. The Geffen Playhouse also has the best staff in the world so it feels like another home when you visit. After the show, grab dinner at The Broxton. End your day partying at Adults Only or Good Times At Davey Waynes.
Bonus points if you manage to eat at Bacari on West 3rd Street or Jones on 3rd. Even more bonus points if you find a way to visit the Americana in Glendale. It’s like another Grove!

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
You know the saying, it takes a village? Well, there are a couple of villages that I’d like to dedicate this to. The first one being my family– Mom, Dad, Michael, and Steven for all the sacrifices they made so that I can be where I am in life.
My roommates– Timmarie, Raul, and especially Danielle for being my family out here in LA.
My boss, Mel, for always motivating me to pursue my dreams and for always showing up for me.
My best friend Riley who has believed in me when I didn’t know how to believe in myself and has been my rock throughout my LA experience.
The Art of Acting Studio because I am absolutely nothing without them. They have healed me in so many ways and are constantly inspiring me to continue growing as both an actor and a human being. Everyone in this studio has in some way saved my life. For that, I am eternally grateful.

Website: https://www.thefightingsoprano.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefightingsoprano/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenmcuret/

Image Credits
My first photo: Huebner Headshots-Leah Huebner