Our top 25 countdown continues, coming in at number seven, Anna Vila Fania.

I remember having this conversation and being so struck by Anna's reflections on originating the role of Gloria Stefan for the Broadway production of On Your Feet, specifically how sustaining Gloria forced her to erase Anna.

This always happens where I remember, I don't know if I was at LaGuardia or JFK and just seeing

your face splashed everywhere.

And it was so cool and it felt so meaningful and so big.

What was happening behind the scenes was, of course, much more complicated.

You recently said that you felt completely lost and depressed. I was really young, wanted to

please everybody, and thought I had to be superhuman at all times. I was constantly self-medicating

and self-sabotaging. Can you give me a sense of what that looked like? So moving to New York and not knowing anybody and being thrown into the spotlight at that

level where like it is such a niche world, Broadway in and of itself.

Anna, they called you a supernova. They called you a supernova. It was a lot for me to handle. And I was definitely not in a place

where I had like the foundations to handle it as gracefully as I maybe could have. So I was really scared.

It's such a massive responsibility to play someone like her who means so much to

so many people and to me, not because of her fame, not because of anything other than what my

family went through to get to this country and what she represents in terms of like the

cultural success story. And it's not about the tangible success.

It's not about money. It's not about any of the glory or any of that. It's about the album

My Tierra. I have been with her and with Emilio at events where any person who comes up to

them and wants a photo or wants to just thank them for representing us at the highest level and at the highest caliber, they never turn them down.

Let's say we're at a luncheon or we're at the White House, which happened.

Being at the White House during the Obama presidency and all of the kind of people who you would expect being there,

all of the fancy people, right?

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