Sherry Cola Always Knew She Was Meant for More—and Then Came Joy Ride
glamour.comBy They say that that life imitates art, but Sherry Cola makes a case for it being the other way around. “I’ve done a lot of characters, but Sherry Cola is me in my truest form,” the Joy Ride actor and comedian tells me. “It’s my home base.
I’m unapologetically myself, confidently Asian, and confidently queer.”No, her last name isn't actually Cola—the stage name is an unintentional “nickname that became a life name” after she found viral success on Vine in 2013 under the username SherryCola. (“People would yell that at me on the street and it stuck.”) It's a fitting moniker for someone who has always made it her number one goal to make people laugh, ever since she was a kid and started doing bits for her mom's friends at the dinner table and creating “funny videos” for her high school film club. “I always knew that I was meant for more,” Cola says. “There was always a through line deep within my soul that because I'm an immigrant, because my parents came here in pursuit of the American dream, how could I possibly be ordinary?”And Cola has proven herself right.
After graduation, Cola took her voice and comedic stylings to college radio at California State University, Fullerton, then hosted a segment on Carson Daly’s radio show before pursuing comedy full time in the stand-up world.
Her first notable role was an arc on I Love Dick, an Amazon Prime show that starred Kathryn Hahn and Kevin Bacon, before landing the part of Alice Kwan, a first-generation Chinese American lesbian, on the long-running Freeform series Good Trouble.She cites Alice for helping her feel comfortable being “truly myself—a hundred percent myself—because I've never felt so just liberated in my own skin.” In fact, she says it was because of the show.
Read more on glamour.com