Pretty Little Liars star Shay Mitchell has admitted she was extremely unhappy with her half-Filipino heritage and went out of her way to look Caucasian.
Growing up in Toronto, Canada, the now-27-year-old actress tells Yahoo Style that she was believed to be “the daughter of a nanny” by her classmates.
“I hated being who I was, and all my friends had blonde hair and blue eyes,” she explains adding that she dyed her hair lighter, wore colored contacts and stayed inside to make sure she was pale as possible.
High school was a tough time for Shay, a former model. She ate her lunch in the bathrooms to avoid bullies and claims she always “wanted to be something that she wasn’t.”
After she graduated, the actress moved to Thailand, then Hong Kong in order to “switch things up.”
While she was living abroad she started to become more independent, having previously never done a single load of her own laundry in her life.
She would move to the United States and become a bottle service model in night clubs. Until she was cast as lesbian teen Emily Fields in Pretty Little Liars.
Now the actress travels to and from new York and Los Angeles.
Despite being thin, Shay insists she loves fast food. Each time she’s in a car on the way to an airport, she takes a large ppizza with her to eat along the way. ‘Whatever I don’t eat I give to the driver, but let’s be honest, there’s only a couple slices left,’ she says.
Shay says she has come a long way since she was discovered 6 years ago. ‘I had a surfboard for the Teen Choice Awards and a picture of Hollywood,’ Shay recalls. ‘Now, when I attain something, I take it off and put something else on.’
