Vanessa Hudgens has achieved quite a bit over the years, but her latest accomplishment marks a very big first, something she’s been eager to do for a good while now — voice a character in an animated feature.
Hudgens is the voice behind Sunny in My Little Pony: A New Generation. She's an Earth Pony who’s determined to find a way to bring the Earth Ponies, Unicorns and Pegasi together again. Trouble is, each species lives separately and has allowed false assumptions, fear and mistrust to continue to drive them apart. However, with the help of a few new friends — Unicorn Izzy (Kimiko Glenn), Pegasi Pipp (Sofia Carson) and Zipp (Liza Koshy), and fellow Earth Pony Hitch (James Marsden) — Sunny might finally be able to bring them all together and restore magic to Equestria in the process.
With My Little Pony: A New Generation now available to stream on Netflix, Hudgens joined us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night to retrace her steps from her earliest credits to her first animated feature. We discussed Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch and Lin Manuel-Miranda’s feature directorial debut Tick, Tick... Boom!, but of course, we had to spend a good chunk of time on the title that sent Hudgens’ star into the stratosphere, High School Musical.
The 2006 release was a colossal success, amassed a significant fanbase and wound up paving the way to two more feature films and then also the 2019 Disney+ series. There’s no downplaying the fact that the film was a phenomenon featuring a hugely talented ensemble, but for Hudgens, High School Musical didn’t necessarily reflect the type of content she was most interested in making. Here’s how she put it:
“I always gravitated to the dark and the weird, and High School Musical wasn’t really dark or weird [laughs]. It was very commercial and bright and poppy and uplifting and while, of course, I love those things and it’s an amazing message and wonderful things to spread, that was never really the game plan for me. I kind of envisioned myself as this serious dramatic indie actress playing all the super tough, gritty, hard parts. And High School Musical came along and I obviously gained success from that, and I think it was really easy for people to put me in a box and it made it a lot harder for me to go after the things that I really wanted, which was still those really gritty, tough, dramatic roles and I learned how to say no very quickly and be really selective about what I was going to do next, and I’m so grateful that I’ve had a team that’s been so supportive and really allowed me to go after my dream.”
The silver lining of being boxed into something you've done before? It's a sign you did that one thing quite well and moviegoers want to see more of it. But clearly that did mean those “tough, dramatic” roles were further away than Hudgens would have liked. However, Hudgens and her team worked to change that, and they succeeded. Here’s what Hudgens said when asked for a title from her filmography that made her feel like she was showing the industry what she was capable of and the types of projects she wanted to do:
“I feel like Spring Breakers definitely hit the nail on the head, because obviously it is those things that I love. It’s dark and it’s weird and it’s a wild ride. And of course Harmony Korine who is such an icon, working alongside of him and then Benoît [Debie], our DP, who’s worked with Gaspar Noé on most of his films. And it was just that world that I wanted to be in so badly, I finally was in and people were taking notice and associating me with that, and that was just a really wonderful moment for me to be like, ‘Okay, I finally did it.’ It took me a while to get there, and it might have taken me longer than I originally planned because while High School Musical was a push forward, it was also a step back in the direction of where I wanted to go. But not upset about it, at all!”
Looking for even more from Hudgens? You’re going to want to catch her episode of Collider Ladies Night at the top of this article or listen to our conversation uncut in podcast form below. Hudgens also went into detail on her love of all things Halloween, how she got involved in My Little Pony: A New Generation, what we can expect from her character in the Army of the Dead animated series and so much more!