Tinsel Korey (born March 25, 1980) is a Canadian actress, best known for portraying the Makah Emily Young in the Twilight Saga films New Moon and Eclipse.
I was in the car driving back, after having done a scene where I kill somebody, and I just said to the driver, "I can't talk right now. I'm too emotional. " The whole car ride back, I was just crying.
I always say that you should just listen to it and see what you think it sounds like it is. I don't think it should be labeled. Most musicians feel like that. No one wants to put their music in a category. But, I don't think it's all over the place. I don't go from metal to jazz, or anything crazy.
Because I have the scar, people are like, "Who did you play in the film?," and I tell them, "The girl with the scar," and then they're like, "Oh, yeah!" I think most people expect me to have the scar.
Most of Emily's backstory is written out between New Moon and Eclipse. I'm reading them as we're shooting the films. I haven't read Breaking Dawn yet. It's just too crazy. There's too much going on that you need a map. I just try to focus on one movie at a time. When we were doing New Moon press, people were already asking about Eclipse. I didn't read it until I was ready to go, so that it was fresh and I wasn't jumbled with all this other stuff.
I just wanted to honor who Emily was. She's just a strong woman. Through my journey of playing her, I found a lot of strength, and I think that I've changed, as a female, in the way that I carry myself. To go through something traumatic, like getting your face scarred, it made me analyze vanity a lot. When you have a little pimple and you're like, "Oh, my god, there's an alien on my face!," you feel like it's magnified.
It was a very, very intense film for me. I almost lost my mind because there are scenes where I have to kill people, and that energy is absolutely overwhelming. At the same time, as an actor, you never play a character with judgment. It's not my place to judge the fact that she kills people. It's for me to look at her psychology to see what makes her do that.
hat made me feel uncomfortable. People would be like, "Woah, that's crazy!," or they'd look at me really funny, but it also helped because that's how people look at Emily. I was like, "Come on, be sensitive! I have a scar on my face. It's not nice to just stare at somebody. " That was really interesting.
Yes, there was a massive difference between their styles. David is a very technical director and Chris is an actor's director, in the sense of emotion. With David, he's done horror films, so Eclipse is much darker, whereas I found New Moon really light and poetic. I didn't have as much interaction with David because the casting process was already done.
I'm a goofball, so I think comedy is one of my stronger points, as an actor. I just never get to do it. But, I'm taking classes at Groundlings, where Will Ferrell and Lisa Kudrow studied, and it's all improv comedy. It feels good to be able to do that and be funny.
I've developed a way to separate myself from me being me, to me being the character. I can separate watching me, Tinsel Korey, from watching Emily
I don't have paparazzi following me. Because I'm a human character, it's different. The vampires get a lot of attention, and then the werewolves, and then the humans. It hasn't really changed that much for me.
I think the paparazzi are absolutely ridiculous. When we were filming, there was a lot of them. It's different being in L. A. , where there are so many celebrities. But, when it was in Vancouver, it was all about the film, so there was paparazzi following us. It's just part of the business.
But, yeah, it was just the regular audition process. There were a couple people telling me about it and that they were looking for the actors, but my manager is pretty good at sorting that out. And, (casting director) Rene Haynes cast me in Into the West, and she's always kept in touch and been a real big supporter of my career.
I was sitting on top of people and it was just really uncomfortable. There was no place to move. And, I don't like auditioning, anyways. With auditions, you can get so nervous, or other things get into your head and throw you off, and it doesn't really reflect what you can do, as an actor. The whole thing was just really nerve-wracking, but I ended up getting it.
It was a realization for me when Oprah was talking about New Moon. I was like, "Oh, my god, she's watched a movie that I've been in!" People were like, "It just kicked in for you?," but it's just work for me. The idea that somebody that I've admired for so long had seen something that I'd done was when I understood the magnitude of it.
Stained is about a lonely bookshop keeper, and her past comes back to haunt her. I play a femme fatale, schizophrenic serial killer. They offered me the part and I was like, "I'm just curious why you thought I would be perfect for this role," and the director (Karen Lam) said, "You have this look that, when you're smiling, you're really sweet, but when you're not smiling, you look like you could kill somebody. "
There's so much going on, with child abuse, not having the right relationships and being in abusive relationships, that play into her, and that energy was constantly in my body for a month. I was the lead character and it was very, very intense.
I've done choir since I was tiny, and I've always tried to get into plays. They all just meshed together. Now with my career, especially with music, people are like, "Which one do you pick?" I don't pick either. They're just different expressions of who I am.
I've always said that I want to play a neo-femme action star, and I kind of got to do that in this movie-of-the-week called "Wyvern," where I got to shoot a gun and be a little bad-ass, but I'd like to do that even further. I'm dorky myself. I'll play "Zelda" for 10 hours.