This interview wit Dolly de Leon was originally published on June 26, 2025 on the DIASPORA Newsletter. Sign up for EXCLUSIVE VIP ACCESS to interviews, articles, podcasts, and videos like this with a paid subscription. Give it a whirl with a free 7-day subscription to the DIASPORA newsletter by clicking here — and then you can upgrade after!
“I’m an island girl. That’s my favorite thing: the beach, the ocean, summer — I love the sun.”
Dolly De Leon talks to me about shooting the second season of the Nicole Kidman-fronted, psilocybin-infused Hulu series Nine Perfect Strangers in the snowy wonderlands of Munich and Salzburg. Being from the tropical islands of the Philippines, she made sure to have a good coat. “I survived,” she laughs. “I was fine. I love the snow. Sometimes it’s just too much for me.”
It’s Saturday morning for actor Dolly de Leon who is currently in Manila, Philippines. For me, it’s Friday night — of course, I am more than willing to spend my Friday night talking to the BAFTA Award-nominated actor.
Also, I have zero plans.
The second season introduces a new batch of dysfunctional characters for Masha (Kidman) to manipulate and play God with. But this season, the stakes are higher as one of the patients hits close to home.
Like the season before it, the transformational wellness retreat brings together people who are annoyingly connected and as the week goes on Masha pushes them to their limits — with the assistance of shrooms, obvi.
This season features an all-star roster: Christine Baranski, Annie Murphy, Mark Strong, Murray Bartlett, Henry Golding, Lena Olin, Lucas Englander, King Princess, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Aras Aydi, and, of course, de Leon who plays former nun Agnes, who has some secrets.
The Philippines is largely Catholic, and growing up in the Philippines, de Leon attended a very strict all-girls Catholic school run by nuns and without mincing words, she tells me, “I was traumatized by nuns.” She isn’t joking. “I was tortured by nuns.” Again, not joking.
“It was horrible,” she says. “It reached a point where I would just avoid them and run.. they scared me.”
But she points out that not all nuns are bad.
“When you’re an adult, nuns treat you with respect,” she says. “I’ve met some nuns who were actually quite nice, and, you know, decent people.” De Leon laughs and admits that she was a bit of a rebel in high school — but then again, who wasn’t? She remembers one particular nun — who remained nameless and says bluntly: “I guess that I was just unfortunate to be in a school with a nun that wasn’t very nice. We all hated her. She was horrible. God bless her. So she’s dead now.”
As for her character Agnes, she seems like a kind nun. Like everyone else at the retreat, she has some baggage She is also connected to others attending the retreat — which is why Masha invited her out to the snow to take some shrooms and get enlightened.
The Philippines has a lot of strict laws for drugs like marijuana, but for psilocybin, there is no legislation against the trippy supplement that is the centerpiece in Nine Perfect Strangers. With that experience under her belt, and some of her research (“Lots of YouTube videos,” she laughs) she came prepared for per portrayal of Agnes.
When we meet Agnes, a children’s TV show host with severe anger management issues named Brian (Murray Bartlett — who de Leon loves) mistakes her for a worker at the retreat so he gives her his luggage. Agnes, being the gracious and giving person she is, just goes with it. But as the show goes on, and the strangers take Masha’s magic brew, Agnes and Brian form an unlikely friendship.
For those who don’t watch the show, let me break it down for you: Brian was a host of one of those puppet-themed kid’s shows. One day, he lost his shit and someone caught it on camera and it went viral and he was “canceled”. As a result, his career was ruined.
Agnes has her problems but hides them better (except for the occasional outburst and banging of the head against a confessional booth). She carries an immense amount of guilt and grief on her shoulders from her past.
We flashback and see her in a hospital and Agnes is helping a woman deliver a baby. There’s a lot of bleeding. She can’t save the baby or the mother. She asks her fellow sister what to do and she simply says “It’s God’s will”. Meaning, the child and the mother will die — and no one there has a shred of empathy. Because of this, Agnes questions her faith, her view on humanity, and feels responsible for the death of the woman and the baby.
“Brian went through a part in his life where he was canceled, and people just lost their trust in him,” de Leon explains. “And Agnes is this, woman, this, first and foremost, this human being who’s gone through trauma and knows what it feels like to be ostracized and to be forgotten and for people to just lose their faith in her.”
She continues, “She sees herself in Brian, and she found the kindred spirit in him….They were both lost and broken, and they just found each other and were able to help and heal, because everything they went through is not even their fault. It’s just the world being assholes.”
“Agnes couldn’t relate to any of the other strangers because they were all caught up in their own world and Brian was also treated with disdain by the other characters. They found that nurturing kind of element in each other.”
After the season 2 finale of Nine Perfect Strangers on July 2, de Leon will next voice the characters of Lo and Li on the second season of Netflix’s animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. This adds to her diverse stateside resume which includes indie and arthouse fare like Ghostlight and Between the Temples as well as more mainstream titles like Paul Feig’s Jackpot! And, of course, there was her award season turn in Triangle of Sadness.
But even before Ruben Östlund’s satirical dark comedy, de Leon had (and still has) a thriving acting career in the Philippines, appearing in numerous films and TV series and working with some of the most reputable Filipino directors, appearing in films such as Raymund Ribay Gutierrez’s Verdict and Lav Diaz’s History of Ha.
Nine Perfect Strangers is de Leon’s first U.S. series — and it won’t be her last. She wants to do it all. She wants to do a Marvel film, an animated feature film, a Broadway production, and more indies. “Right now, I’m really lucky and I’m happy saying that because I’ve never really considered myself lucky,” admits a humbled de Leon. “But luck is not the only thing in the picture, I have a great team.”
She added, “I’m glad this happened when it did because if this happened in the ‘90s, it would have ended with Triangle of Sadness and I wouldn’t be working again.”
De Leon has one foot in the Filipino entertainment industry and another in Hollywood as a Filipino. Two different worlds — and she feels it.
“It’s crazy how different it is, and also crazy how similar it is,” she said. “It’s more of when I encounter a new way of working, I completely shift gears.”
For all you actors in America brace yourself: you have it really good here.
“They make life so much easier [in the U.S.],” de Leon admits. In the Philippines, they often have to go to set with their own wardrobe, do their own makeup, and communication is very minimal. She says that there are some days that you are called to set, and you wait the whole day and don’t even work.
“It’s so much more efficient in [the U.S.]”, she says. “It was a huge culture shock for me when I first got there — especially because my first job [in the U.S.] Jackpot!. It was a well-oiled machine.”
Another huge difference is that there are no unions in the Philippines. “We’re not protected here,” de Leon points out. She goes on to say that there are times when they will get to work at 6am and won’t leave until 7am the next day and not get paid appropriately.
De Leon is one of the few — if not the only Filipino actors who have starred in major Filipino productions and major Western productions. She is a Filipino crossover actor — something that we rarely see. And she knows exactly what to do.
“I think that’s why I continue to work [in the Philippines] because ultimately, I want to be able to share best practices with productions here in the Philippines so that we can up our game,” de Leon says, adding that Filipino-fronted entertainment struggles to break through in the United States because it lacks the production value appeal of something like, say, Korean films and K-dramas.
“They’re elevated,” she says. “The production value is excellent. Here in the Philippines, we don’t put too much stock in production value. All we care about is commerciality and that’s it.”
“Filipinos are all over the world. So you release a film in any country it’s going to do well because there will be Filipinos there who will watch it. So I think it’s just that we need to up our game.”
The conversation turns very honest as we talk about another thing Filipinos and Filipino Americans have in common: how we love to tear each other down with a quickness. We’re not talking about constructive criticism. We’re talking crab mentality. “It’s cultural,” she explains. “It all came from how we were colonized for such a long time. We were put in a caste system that carried over to the present day.”
De Leon is a member of a guild in the Philippines, where the aim is to improve work ethics in the film industry. Ultimately, de Leon’s goal is to produce in the Philippines and crossover stateside — something she’s already started to do.
There is no DEI or such a thing as “representation” in the Philippines because everyone is Filipino, but de Leon is still representing something a shift in the industry. In a time when the “DEI” is a bad word and seeing diversity — let alone Filipino faces on screen is in limbo, de Leon is a bridge between the worlds of Filipino American film & TV and Filipino film & TV. But she does not feel any pressure. She’s going to do what she does best.
She’s gonna be Dolly.
“In the beginning, everyone was saying, ‘She’s carrying the Filipino flag for everyone!’”, she recalls. “What is this? A Miss Universe pageant we have to win? Sure I’ll carry the Philippine flag, but that’s just part of it.”
She continues, “I was so afraid of failure because I felt like I was going to let the whole country down… I’m already over the ‘I hope you still love me’ part. At the end of the day, we’re all human. We’re just doing our best, and if we fail, if we make mistakes… sure, call me out on it. Next time, I promise to do better. But let’s not pull each other down… There’s no point in that. Right now, I’m a mother of four; I’m a working actor; and I’m happy where I am.”
