Whitney Peak

"Once you start to become more aware of different things and look at the bigger picture, it’s not so black and white"

"Another thing I got from living in Uganda is that there’s such a strong sense of community; everyone who lived in that village was considered my family."

"I’ve never really had somewhere that feels like home."

"I was very exposed to a different world of art and culture and different philosophies, and I feel grateful for that because it helped shape my idea of the world"

"Growing up in Uganda, I saw a lot of white people, but I never felt like a minority—I thought this is what it’s like everywhere"

"When we moved to Vancouver, my mother had to relearn a lot of things—the only things that she really got to bring with her were her religion and her culture"

"My family has always been quite theatrical just in our being"

"That was my introduction to character study and acting as a means of understanding people and relationships"

"When I moved to New York, it was the first time I felt that I could live for myself and try different things"

"But I also am a firm believer that it’s about the people you have around you"

"In Uganda, I would never have thought of doing this job. Not because it doesn’t happen there but because it’s as if, in my mind and in my family’s mind, we already had a completely different path mapped out for our lives. Instead, Canada has opened up new opportunities for me that I could not have imagined"

"I feel like when you’re putting too much pressure on something it tends to combust, so you have to find pockets of different creative release"

"Even though acting is a creative outlet, it’s not something that you can do by yourself unless you’re reading scripts or analyzing movies"

"I want to experiment and push myself to see how far I can go. I’m down for anything that’s as far from me as possible. So whatever that means to you, to whoever’s reading this, I just want to do that. I want to do some crazy shit"

"In Uganda, the culture that you’re born into is kind of what you follow throughout the rest of your life, but when I came here, it felt more like I had the option to be my own person and choose where I wanted my life to go."