Piper Kurda remembers exactly where she was when she found out she had been cast as the lead in Pixar’s latest animated film, “Hoppers.”
Carda was relaxing with her best friend in her Chicago apartment when she got a call from her agent, offering her “the most insane opportunity of my life.” She and her friend ordered a milk bar as a mini celebration to mark the occasion. “The relative smallness of that moment is a perfect counterpoint to how big the rest of it was,” Kurda says.
Kurda joins our conversation from the UK, where she is busy finishing up a weeks-long press tour ahead of the film’s release. In “Hoppers,” Kurda plays the voice of Mabel Tanaka, a 19-year-old passionate animal lover who infiltrates the animal kingdom after discovering technology that allows humans to transfer their consciousness into lifelike robots. For the 28-year-old, it’s a big role he’s been waiting for for a long time.
Kurda has been an actress for as long as she can remember (like many actors, one of her first credits was an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2011). “I literally have never wanted to do anything different in my life,” she says. Some of you may know Kurda from her numerous stints at Disney as a teenager in the mid-2010s. She has appeared in TV shows and movies such as “I Didn’t Do It,” “ANT Farm,” “Liv and Maddie,” “Teen Beach 2,” and lent her voice to the Disney XD animated series “Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja.” After that, she acted consistently and appeared in various projects such as “The Wretched”, “Youth & Consequences”, and “May December”.
When work slowed due to the pandemic and actors’ strike, Kurda turned to social media platforms as a creative outlet and started posting on TikTok. People were immediately interested. Kurda answered questions in the comments about his work as an actor and behind the scenes of his work in the entertainment industry. “You forget how interesting our industry is and how interesting the whole process is because you’ve been in this industry for so long,” she says.
With no steady acting work available at the time, Kurda told her followers that she took up a job in retail to help pay the rent. This was also a confession that resonated with her growing number of viewers. Without her, Kurda might not have landed Mabel. “Hoppers” director Daniel Chong had actually seen her video before auditioning. “I think the fact that I was just being myself sparked his interest, because he always knew who he wanted Mabel to be,” Kurda explains. “I think he saw that in me and thought, ‘Okay, I’d like to see her read for Mabel.'”
Kurda is used to being in the spotlight, but starring in a feature film is an interesting experience for her. “It’s very strange for me to be a leader of something because I haven’t been a leader for a long time and I’ve been told I can’t be one,” Kurda says. “I’ve been an Asian best friend, or an ethnic best friend, for a really long time.”
This experience made Kurda even more aware of how special the role of the tenacious and fierce Mabel was. “She doesn’t take no for an answer, and I think we all need a little more of that attitude, especially young women who have been told most of their lives to just sit and shut up,” Kurda says. “It’s really inspiring and empowering to play a character who would never do that…It’s just amazing to play her.”
During his transition, Kurda became emotional as he reflected on the entire process of creating “Hoppers” and his own journey in the industry.
“This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, and I’ve been doing it for 20 years,” Kurda says. “I’ve seen a lot of people walk away from it for good reasons, but I just didn’t have the heart in me to do it. And now I’m so glad I didn’t.”
