words yvonne teh

TV Carpio takes a cosmic step away from the shadow of her famous mother.

She was born in Oklahoma City and her father is a cowboy with a Southern accent. Yet when TV Carpio (“Theresa Victoria is really formal,” she says. “TV is my real name and that is always what I have been called at home”) breaks into song – as she does in one memorable scene in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe – there is no mistaking that the Asian-American singer, songwriter and actress is the daughter of singing star Teresa Carpio.

TV Carpio spent the early part of her life in Hong Kong and still counts Cantonese among the languages she speaks. Thus far, however, she’s chosen to pursue a career in the USA. “I always wanted to be like my mom,” she says, but she had no intention of riding on her mother’s apron strings. “The whole point of me trying to do it over there instead of over here is that [in the States] I didn’t have the stigma of being Teresa Carpio’s daughter. I didn’t have any ‘in’s. I wanted to see if I could do it; if I had any talent, whether anybody would recognize it if I was just anyone.”

She quickly discovered that it can be difficult. “Not having a name, being female and then being Asian – the parts just get fewer and fewer.” So when, by the third or fourth audition call back, she found herself seriously in the running to play one of six main characters in Across the Universe, she recalls with a laugh, “It was like ‘Oh my gosh, I have to get this part or I’ll die!’”

And the thrills didn’t end after she was cast in the musical that intertwines over 30 Beatles songs with love stories and tales of political protest, because Julie Taymor had “really loved” her from the first time Carpio auditioned for Prudence, the free spirit looking for a place to fit in and call home. Not only is the film itself akin to being taken on a trip down Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole but the process of making it was that way too. Taymor is given to what Carpio calls “strokes of genius” – on the very first day of shooting, the director had her star “being bodypainted nude on a three by three platform in the middle of a lake [dancing] with grotesque movements, singing ‘jai guru deva om’!”

Furthermore, although she doesn’t appear on screen with special guest star Bono, the music legend specially requested to meet her after beholding her achingly wistful rendition of I Want To Hold Your Hand for the film. Even better was to follow, when at their meeting, Bono said to her, “I don’t know much about anything, but I know about singing and I know that you can sing. I just want you to know that!” Small wonder that in the wake of it all, TV is feeling that she’s living her dream, and is “a blessed gal to be able to be doing something that I love as a job”.

Across the Universe is currently showing in theatres.