"I was a cheerleader. That was really surprising to me because I’ve always been a bigger girl, and so the fact that I was Ariel when I was younger and then a cheerleader in Grease: I thought that was so strange. I’ve always been aware of my body and not so confident with it. Tracy [Turnblad], my [Haispray] character, is the complete opposite. She doesn’t know that she’s supposed to hate herself and her body. I felt the opposite way: I did not love my body. But recently I started to accept myself, to love myself. A lot of that has to do with Hairspray actually, when I saw the movie first, before anything else. I watched clips on YouTube of the Broadway version, and I fell in love with this girl: There’s self-love in almost every scene. Hairspray, in general, I think is just a body-positive masterpiece."

I recently went back and watched the original movie, before it even became a musical, and was struck by the same thing. It's hard to be a woman who doesn't stack up to society's version of "ideal."

"I was bullied a lot. But I didn’t feel like I should hold back anything when I was on stage. When I got the [early] parts, I was like, 'Why would they cast me as this?' But when I was on stage, it didn’t matter. I think a lot of [my] self-hate came from bullying, whereas Tracy: She’s not oblivious to it. One of my lines in the show is, ‘Everybody says that a girl who looks like me can’t get this guy, but I know that he’ll look inside of me.’ So I know that she looks at people in a certain way."

Flash-forward from the early days: How did you wind up auditioning for Hairspray Live! this year?

"I was in my sophomore year of college and I saw ads on Facebook that there was an open call for Tracy Turnblad. I really wanted to do it, but I was also really nervous because this would be my first professional audition, and I was thinking: If I can’t get Tracy, what can I get? What is there for me?

"I woke up at 3 a.m. and prepared my short portion of 'Good Morning Baltimore,' my favorite song from the show. I went to the audition at 6:45 a.m., and the audition started at 10 a.m. I was already 343rd in line. I started at the beginning of the line, and as I was walking there were girls who looked like me, who were singing similarly to me. I was so nervous — girls were wearing like wigs and skirts and I was wearing a sweater and pants. I think I was the only girl that had pants. Then I got into the audition room at noon and I sang; I felt confident with it and I was asked to sing the end of 'Good Morning Baltimore,' which I did not know, so I made up most of the words."