True to My Name: Hope Luna in Co-Creation with Spirit
Photographer: Jordan Mason. Art Direction: Rebecca Lilenbaum.
I stopped by Hope Luna’s place in West Hollywood on a Monday. The sun poked out reluctantly from behind heavy clouds. She wore a pink slip and a lacy ochre robe. Her wrists were beaded with bracelets, and a prominent flower pendant hung from her throat. “Do you want chamomile?” she offered.
There was a ring light in the corner of the room — a staple in the toolbox of the working actor. A large blank canvas leaned against a bookshelf next to a framed poster from a play she and I worked on. For the first half of our conversation, sunlight beamed over the blank canvas. She pointed out “my crows” calling outside, and birds poked at the treats she had left on her balcony.
“Let’s do a meditation first,” she said as I settled in. “Sit on the floor, make yourself comfortable as you like.” She played a song from her phone in an ethereal language and placed a white, heart-shaped stone next to me. She nodded approvingly when I held it over my heart.
Hope is an actor. A simple sentence that contains a multi-billion dollar industry, throngs of starry-eyed Los Angeles transplants, and an undefeated belief in storytelling. Today, I want to hear about how Hope’s unconventional spirituality informs her work as an actor.
Photographer: Jordan Mason. Art Direction: Rebecca Lilenbaum.
Against the odds (and best medical advice), Hope Luna was born prematurely and weighed three pounds at birth. Her parents went to their place of worship to be prayed over, and her mother was anointed with oil. When she emerged healthy from the NICU, the name “Hope” was a natural choice.
Luna cites three familial figures as central to the emergence of her presently-held faith practice: her former pastor, current professor father of Mexican heritage, her marriage and family therapist mother of Syrian heritage, and her Abuelita, a Catholic Mexican spiritual practitioner.
“You have two lineages of very oppressed peoples who only survived by their faith,” Luna says. “What lives in my blood is faith beyond measure.”
This is easy to believe today when you look at Luna’s bright eyes and the crystals and candles lining her bedroom. But leaving organized religion to forge her own spiritual path left its marks. Closeted for years, Luna confides a diagnosis of a severe anxiety disorder. “I found in strict sects of organized Christian religion, they don’t put love at the forefront. They get into the nitty-gritty, painful, exploitative facets of who you are as a human being to mold you into someone they think you should be,” she says. “And when you don’t think or feel the same way naturally — if you are closeted and mixed — then you often feel ostracized. It was the root of a lot of fear and anxiety for me.
“My practices today come from all sorts of beliefs,” Luna continues as I sip my chamomile. “I often call upon the archangels as my Abuelita did. Bible verses will come to mind when I’m in times of trouble like my father taught me. I use psychology in times of anxiety — like my mom has taught me.”
Anxiety is the bread and butter of her chosen industry. (I have always respected — and feared! — actors for the required fearlessness and vulnerability of their calling.) A graduate of NYU Tisch, Luna booked her first professional gig at seventeen and is trained in live performance, immersive theatre, Shakespeare, TV, film, commercial, and voiceover work. “I find that as long as I’m centered, it’s all the same, any medium,” she shrugs after she rattles off the list. “I’m also of the belief that even me dancing around in the park is a performance. Even if only the trees are watching me.”
“Is it still authentic when it’s a performance?” I ask.
“I think everything is a performance,” she replies gaily.
“When I’m five years old, dancing around in my bedroom, that is a Tony Award-winning performance, that is authentic. Me entering meditation is a performance. Who am I performing for? Self.”
Luna deems meditation and manifestation the cornerstones of her practice. “It’s all about shadow work,” she says. “Fighting those voices in your mind that want to hold you back, working through what is for your soul’s growth and what is ego. It’s about deconstructing the narratives that have been fed to us, specifically in the Western world. I can only speak from a Western perspective, but I can tell you — TRASH MAG already knows — the Western world is not kind to women, to women of color, to queer women…
“When I meditate and manifest, I reclaim my autonomy in co-creation with Spirit, and that is when I am most at peace.”
Photographer: Jordan Mason. Art Direction: Rebecca Lilenbaum.
I witnessed Luna in rehearsal last April when we worked together on the play Gruesome Playground Injuries in Hollywood. Before scene work, she would sit separately from the rest of us with her headphones on, rhythmically tapping or shaking — or sometimes very, very still. “There is a small part of me that is very aware that I am still Hope Luna, it is Hope Luna’s body, Hope Luna’s vessel,” she says, her voice slipping into a dreamlike, childlike tone. “But when I’m dropped into character, it’s an exploration. It’s like becoming someone else. My posture changes, my voice changes, my temperature changes, my thoughts change. I love that about acting. I love that I get to explore.”
Aware of the misconceptions about her brand of method acting, Luna adds a caveat: “I had an excellent teacher at Stella Adler who said, if you can’t have a cup of coffee after you’re done your character work — if you can’t come back to self and live your normal life — you’re doing something wrong.”
She applies this “cup of coffee” rule of thumb to managing anxiety disorder as well, with input from her therapist mother. “Anxiety is the warning light of your body telling you something is not sitting right with your soul,” she says carefully, playing with the flower pendant at her throat. “Anxiety wants to keep you safe. To protect you. Oftentimes, intuition is telling us the same thing… But when we allow our anxiety to completely take over and control our lives, we enter Fight, Flight, or Freeze. And we want to live with more fluidity than that.
“Psychology and acting and spirituality all coexist. And I think some people would call that ‘hippie woo-woo shit.’ But it works for me!”
Luna is all about newcomers to spirituality practices forging their own path. “Spirituality is for everyone!” she insists. “The belief that it’s not comes from the colonizer root of ‘some of you are chosen, some are not.’ Find your own beliefs and your own practices. If that comes in the form of organized religion, so be it and God bless you. I support and honor you. But listen to your own body. Write down your experiences. If you can, honor your ancestors and heritage. It doesn’t have to be rigid. It can be fun and it can be healing.”
And Luna’s spiritual practice is not an island. She has been able to find her own community, her self-termed “soul family,” to reflect on the daily synchronicities of the universe she observes. “For example, when I walked down to get you at the door,” she says. “I noticed a blue feather on the ground. To me, blue is significant of the throat chakra. A feather signifies protection and ancestral healing. Which is pretty on point for what we’re doing right now!
“When you take the time to notice those little ‘coincidences,’ you often feel like you’re going out of your mind, and you second-guess your intuition,” she laughs. “So it’s helpful to have friends who look at me like, ‘You’re not crazy. I see them too.’ We can share space and see them together.”
I marvel at her self-contained universe of tranquility and reflection in an industry known to be shallow and image-obsessed. But Luna is no fragile flower.
“When I am at work, I am a racehorse at the gate with blinders on. I am ten toes in the present moment, immersed in character, focused,” she says.
“When I take my eyes off the prize or allow energies that are more status-obsessed to interfere, I lose myself. Or, I used to! But now, because I am so rooted in my personal power, they don’t bother me as much. Truly.”
Letting water flow off her back is just how Luna rolls these days. “Because of my history with organized religion, I try to stay away from the spirit of judgment,” she says frankly. “I know that if someone is judging me for my practices, it’s a reflection of themselves. Anything oppressive, capitalistic, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, or ableist — makes me feel ill. But for the most part, if someone doesn’t understand me, I don’t mind.”
“What title would you give yourself as a spiritual practitioner?” I wonder, thinking of witchtok, shamans, priests, and clergy in their gowns.
Luna smiles. “I’ve thought about this a lot. I would say I’m just Hope.”
Photographer: Jordan Mason. Art Direction: Rebecca Lilenbaum.
