Sofia Hasmik on growing alongside her character and blocking everything out

I thought we would start off with a fun little game. I’m sure you’ve heard of the game, Would You Rather?

Yeah.

So, I have a few. Would You Rather questions for you. If an evil wizard were to turn you into a produce item, would you rather live out your days as a fruit? Or would you rather be a vegetable?

A fruit.

Which fruit?

A persimmon. It’s the color of an orange. Depending on when you like to eat it, it’s a little hard and crunchy, with a good little snap bite, or it’s just mushy and sweet. It’s one of my favorite fruits. They’re great, [and] dried, they’re amazing. My mom dries them sometimes for me. It’s a [great] snack to have around. I can’t believe I said persimmon.

At least it’s versatile. If you were going to be a fruit, that’s the way to go, a versatile fruit.

Would you rather only be able to read backwards for a month or only be able to speak backwards for a month?

Read backwards.

That would be pretty cool if you could read backwards.

I think that’d be a fun thing, and then if I get lost, I can still speak forwards.

Would you rather have the ability to rewind the time to prevent an embarrassing moment from happening? Or would you rather have the ability to rewind time to prevent a chain of inconvenient events from happening?

If I could, I choose neither.

What would your third option be?

To just not mess with time whatsoever.

That’s true. If the movies have taught us anything, it’s to leave the timelines alone.

Yeah, knowing me, I’d go back to prevent something, and I would just make it worse somehow.

Yeah, or it would be a chain reaction where you change one thing, and then the whole future is screwed up.

If I [could] isolate it, I would maybe go back in time to prevent an embarrassing thing from happening only if it doesn’t change the entire timeline of anything else.

Yeah, that’s the tricky part. You change one thing; you change everything, it seems. At least, that’s what the media teaches us.

I’m a little apprehensive [about] that one, but if I had to choose, I would say the embarrassing moment. 

Going back to your earlier days when you were starting your acting career, I feel like everyone has their own little story about how they started pursuing acting. What was your introduction to acting? And what made you feel like you wanted to start pursuing it as a career?

Yeah, so I started acting when I quit figure skating. I did that for thirteen, some odd years, and that’s really where all of my focus was growing up. There was a lot of before school [activities], and after school[activities], and doing all of the other supplemental sports for it like ballet and gymnastics, and all that stuff. I didn’t realize it then, but that was my avenue of expression. And it felt very freeing, and it felt very creative. And so, when I took a step back and I quit, I happened to be in an acting class in high school, and I realized that it offered that same form of creativity, expression, and the ability to sort of pause time, a little bit and I really, really, fell in love with that. I would say I realized I wanted to pursue it as a career when I was studying at UCSB. I got into their conservatory program for acting, and I didn’t even really see it as a career. It was just something that I knew I needed and wanted to do for as long as I could.

How did you get into figure skating? I’m curious about that now.

It was honestly a random thing [that would lead] to a whole timeline. Somebody had gifted me as a child [when] I was around three years old, a pair of roller skates, and there was an ice rink at the time in the North Hollywood Van Nuys area that was doing these twenty-minute classes for little kids. My parents knew about it, and they were like, ‘All right. Well, she has these roller skates. We gotta teach her balance somehow. Figure skating is pretty close. Why don’t we try that? And then maybe she’ll learn how to roller skate.’ And then that quickly turned into me doing one-on-one lessons, and then that quickly turned into me having a bunch of coaches. I really, really fell in love with it, and it became such a family affair. Everybody was involved with it from really the day I started.

That’s wonderful. I also feel like figure skating or just ice skating would be harder than roller skating. So, I don’t see their logic in that. I mean, if you can ice skate, you can definitely roller skate, but it’s not vice versa.

I went to a roller rink in Vancouver last year, and people know that I figure skate, and everyone thought that ‘Oh, she’s going to show up. She’s going to know what she’s doing.’ I could not figure out balance to save my life. For some reason, those roller skates were far more dangerous than any blade on an ice rink. I could not figure it out. I think inline blading is probably closer to [ice skating]. But even that, I tried it a couple of years ago, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve completely forgotten how to stand up.

Sticking with the beginning of your career still, what do you feel was the most useful advice that you got? And what is something that you think would be useful to tell people that are getting into acting in the present day?

I think that the best thing that you can do for yourself is to continue working at it. The way I see acting is really the way I saw figure skating. You have to constantly be working on yourself and [want] to learn and [want] to grow. I’ve stayed in acting classes because there’s always room for growth.  So, I think that the best advice I’ve got is to keep going [on] that journey and to [continue] pushing yourself to be open to more discovery, to be able to discover more within yourself and within the world. And also, ask as many questions as you possibly can. Don’t feel judged or insecure about it. I guess it all just goes back to knowledge.

Most definitely, it’s one of those things where if you don’t ask, then you can never learn. I always say there is no such thing as a stupid question because there is no stupid question.

Yeah, no, there is no stupid question, and I’ve done the thing where I’ve stayed quiet so that I don’t appear to not know, or [so] that I don’t come off [as] green, and it’s only ever hurt me in the long run so it’s better to get in front of it as much as you can, and that also shows that you want to learn.

Is there any outstanding advice that you were given in the early days when you were first starting?

Yeah, I focused a lot of my energy on my classes and what I [could] do to sort of quiet everything else out and go back to why [I] started this journey in the first place. That’s the advice that I had been given, which is to quiet all of that out and find a space for you to create, no matter what, and know that you will always be creative. You just need to be able to try to close everything else out as best you can.

I think that’s one of the hardest things for people to learn when they first start going into a creative career. Just to be able to focus on yourself and your own thoughts and stuff and not pay attention to everything else around you. It’s a hard thing to master.

It’s something that you have to practice all the time. I still work at it, and I will more than likely work at it forever. It’s so easy to get inundated with everything on the outside. But when you have those moments of silence to really look inward, it’s a powerful thing.

Moving on from acting, we already learned that you know how to figure skate, which is pretty cool. But are there any other things that you like to do outside of acting that you think would surprise people?

 I love being outdoors. I really do. I’m outside more than I am inside. I go on hikes almost every day. I love galloping with my dog. We have this thing where we look at each other and kind of give like a head nod, and then we just start galloping together [while she has] her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth. I don’t know if that’s much of a surprise. But yeah, I just love being outside.

What kind of dog is it?

She’s a combination of so many things. When we got her, we were told that her mom was a Beagle, and then as a gift, my partner’s mother gave us a doggy DNA test, and she was everything under the sun except a beagle, like Pit, Golden Retriever, Boxer, German shepherd, and then the list goes on and on and on and on.

Wow! That’s impressive.

And we’ve kind of mirrored each other’s personalities, which is hilarious.

It always happens when you have pets ‘cause you’re always around each other, and you pick up on each other, and then the next thing you know, you’re acting like each other.

Yep, so it’s just the two of us here just being distant and cozy.

What’s her name?

Her name is Harlow.