INTERVIEW
Vee Pandey | 21/12/2025
Qymira stands at the edge of a year that has seen dream after dream come true. Fresh off a red‑eye to Los Angeles, running on no sleep and too much adrenaline as she counts down the days to the premiere of Shadow Transit, the action-noir‑ film that marks her first leading role as Celeste - and the moment all the different parts of her creative life finally collide on one screen.
For Qymira, 2025 has unfolded at 100 miles per hour: touring, composing, shooting, designing, rarely stopping. “It’s always like this,” she laughs. “You try to adjust, and then after you’ve adjusted, you’re leaving.” Sleep has often felt optional; “it’s been not just days, but weeks, months of not sleeping,” she admits, describing jet lag so relentless that even when she can rest, her body no longer remembers how.
Yet when she talks about it, the overriding emotion is gratitude rather than complaint - a sense of having been handed the very life she once imagined as a child glued to Disney films, dreaming of costumes, orchestras and big screens. Standing on stage later, watching her own character on a cinema screen behind an orchestra, she thinks of that little girl who told her mother, “Actresses are so cool. They get to play characters and get dressed up in costumes,” and realises she has somehow stepped inside that fantasy.
On the surface, Shadow Transit looks like a breakout opportunity: a high gloss‑ action noir with gunfights and chases, pairing Qymira with a co-lead‑ in a story that threads love, loss and danger through neon lit‑ city streets. Underneath, it has become something stranger and more intimate - a film in which the boundaries between Qymira the actress, Qymira the composer and Qymira the little girl who loved shadows blur almost completely.
Celeste, her character, is not a convenient invention so much as a refracted version of her own inner world. Both have known loss; both are learning how to move again while still grieving, how to balance the urge to give up with the stubborn instinct to fight. “In this case, it’s almost one,” she says slowly. “The character I play is Celeste, so I cannot really tell the difference.”
That bleed between life and performance is deliberate. Celeste is a woman drifting through life, trying to cope with her mental health, “almost giving up, but then you fight, and then other circumstances throw you back in.” Those rhythms feel painfully familiar to Qymira. The role is “very personal,” she says; this time she is not hiding behind an invented monster or an abstract villain. “It’s also bearing your soul and your own personal experience.”
Before filming began, she had already started writing the score that would become the film’s emotional spine, building Celeste’s world first in music, then inhabiting it on set. She wrote an instrumental album and picked the pieces she felt captured Celeste’s inner world, even before she had seen the finished script. On set, the director Pedring Lopez encouraged her and her colead to improvise, often throwing out dialogue in favour of whatever feeling arrived on the day. “Director Pedring Lopez gave us lots of freedom to improvise,” she says. “So a lot of the time, things change even already from the script.” Instead of rewriting the music, she made herself a rule: “You’re not going to change anything on the music… you’re going to just put whatever music that you’ve already written that came from here‑, pointing at her heart, and improvise based on how I felt when I was writing the music.”
If Shadow Transit has a heartbeat, it is “Shade of My Shadow,” the orchestral theme song that threads through the film. The song grew from a simple, almost childlike fascination with shadows, those games of hand shapes on the wall, the way light shifts their edges into a metaphor for how she has learned to live with the darker parts of herself. “You either are afraid of your shadow, or you can treat your shadow as your friend,” she explains. “Whatever shape you make, the shadow makes with you, kind of like a partner.”
Suit, Norma Kamali. Shoes, Tom Ford.
The word “shade” matters to her. She remembers standing outside in the sun while working on the lyrics, watching how her shadow softened and thinned in places. “The shadow is not that dark, you know, in certain places,” she thought, which led her to ask how much of fear is angle and perspective. “It depends on how you see things,” she says now, “how deep or how coloured your shadow becomes.”
On stage at Manila’s Dolphy Theatre, dressed in the self‑designed white gown that has become instantly recognisable from the video, that idea became startlingly literal. Behind her, scenes from Shadow Transit flickered; around her, the orchestra swelled; on her, six childhood dreams - movies, music, fashion, orchestra, piano, storytelling, finally shared the same frame. “I hadn’t realized that all six dreams had just come true on this one stage,” she recalls. “With the movie in the background… work with the orchestra, in my own dress, and, you know, do my own song and the score, and play the piano with the orchestra and the movie… behind me.”
The realisation hit so hard that it drove her to tears midperformance. “It was so surreal that it actually drove me to tears,” she says, laughing at herself. Instead of cutting around it, Pedring Lopez‑ told her to lean in: “Use it, whatever you’re thinking about.” She did. The emotion stayed in the take.
That Dolphy Theatre performance now feels like a hinge in her story, a moment where pop, film and couture fold into one another. For Qymira, it was less strategy than revelation. She had designed the gown, written the lyrics, composed the score, played the piano, and embodied both Celeste and herself in the same breath, deliberately blurring the line so audiences could not quite tell who stood at the centre of the story.
Backstage, she found herself asking Pedring Lopez a question that sounded like a riddle: “Do you want me to sing the song as Celeste or as Qymira?” At first, he thought it would be quite fun if she continued the character on stage, as if the movie simply spilled into the music video. Then he wondered whether she might bring more of herself, too. In the end, she refused to choose. “I decided, okay, you know what, I’m going to merge the two together,” she says. “So you can’t tell whether it’s Qymira or Celeste. That kind of emotional marriage in a way.”
Audiences seem to feel that fusion instinctively. People who watched the music video and then saw the trailer told her it felt “almost like a trailer music video,” a continuation of the story rather than a separate promotional piece. That, to her, is the point: a world where her music, her acting and her visual imagination exist in the same breath.
Even the fashion carries narrative weight. The white dress - soon to be joined by other looks tied to a four‑seasons, story‑driven instrumental project - is part of how she builds a universe, using fabric and silhouette as extensions of character and mood. This first gown was rushed into existence; at one point she remembers asking herself, only half joking, “How do I make three dresses in a week?” But the pressure underscored something important. “This actually gave me a good beginning to go, right, you know what? This is the direction,” she says. If Celeste is her identity in this film, then dressing her and herself becomes part of the storytelling.
Listen long enough and it becomes clear that this dreamy year has also been brutal. Production delays threatened to derail Shadow Transit just as distribution and casting locked into place, forcing Qymira to step into a far more hands-on producer role than she ever expected. “I was expecting to step in as an actress,” she says. Instead, she found herself right in the middle of the machinery that makes a film possible.
Still, she talks about the experience as a huge learning curve rather than a cautionary tale, a crash course in just how much pressure an independent film can exert on the people trying to hold it together. Faced with the choice to fold or fall, she decided to use it all, channeling her frustration and fear straight into Celeste’s emotional life.
Part of what drives her is a piece of advice from her father that has become both mantra and mischief. “Opportunities never strike at the perfect time,” he told her. “You just need to basically recognize they’re opportunities and grab hold of them and then learn how to do it.” She calls it “a blessing and a curse.” The blessing is obvious: “I will always say yes to something, and then I will go and learn and train,” she says. The curse is that “sometimes you can bite off a bit more than you can chew,” only realising how much you’ve taken on when time is running out.
It is why she agreed to design dresses in a week, train in a new martial‑arts style in a couple of days, and shoulder responsibilities that could easily have belonged to three different people. She is candid about the fear that comes with that whisper of impostor syndrome, the dread of not being enough but she is more afraid of the alternative. “I’d rather do that than be fully, fully prepared to wait for another opportunity to come,” she says. “Yes, it’s scary, but the opposite is even scarier, of losing opportunities.”
If this chapter has been about convergence, the next one is about how far she can carry that momentum. Early next year she joins a cathedral tour with Collaboro that will put her classical side front and centre in some of the UK’s most atmospheric spaces. “I feel the chills sometimes when I go into a very grand church or cathedral,” she says. “You feel the presence, you know, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re religious or not.” The idea of singing in those spaces, letting her voice rise into centuriesold‑ stone, clearly excites her.
Between dates, she will be promoting Shadow Transit as it rolls into new territories and continues its festival journey, hoping the intimate, emotionally driven story resonates as deeply with audiences as it does with her. Yet when she talks about the project, she rarely frames it as her triumph alone. “It really takes everything and everyone,” she says. Pedring Lopez trusted her enough to let her improvise; the crews who built entire worlds out of raw materials; the orchestra that helped her turn inner weather into sound; the producers and friends who kept nudging the film forward when it might have stalled. “It’s not just my dream, it’s everyone else’s dream as well,” she says.
For all its noir shadows and high‑stakes action, Shadow Transit ultimately feels like a testament to collective faith: in the right story, the right moment, and a woman determined to meet both with her whole, unfragmented self.
Creative Jessica San @jessicas4n
Photography Jessica San @jessicas4n
Styling Natalie Fajer Wood @nataliefajerwood
HMUA Rebecca Hampson @rebeccahampsonmakeup
Top, Zara. Trousers, Cos. Necklace, H&M.
Coat & Suit, Armani.
In talking about finding our authentic selves, it’s a journey that hasn’t always escaped bumps in the road. Having had to rebuild his life when recovering from a severe allergic reaction and the wake of disaster it left in its tracks, I admire his honesty and the likelihood that it will help someone else who may be going through something similar, physically or emotionally. “I think it's cool that we share these little bits of our story that hopefully somebody else sees and has a moment of inspiration.” I wonder how that experience became something he was able to bolster and cope with. “I worked with my therapist about it. I was going to speech therapy, physical therapy, and doing all the different kinds of cognitive behavioral therapy. So each one was touching a different point for me as I was working through these stages of recovery.” Physically and emotionally working through it simultaneously, Pierson describes it as medicine for him, helping him cope with the frustration of not being able to remember words, names, or people's faces. “It was confronting it every day head-on, not sidestepping it or thinking I'm just going to ignore it today. I think that would have been the worst idea ever for me. I am not that personality type. I love taking things head-on, and so that was my methodology, and that helped me a ton.”
Having found being open about my own mental health has been a key part of healing, I’m curious what healing means to Pierson. “I think for me, dealing with depression and anxiety, especially early on, when I moved to Hollywood, and certain other things happened in my life, I realized I was working through a lot of those pieces, and I didn’t have the right tools to do it. So it may have left deeper scars than it needed to, but I think the healing process is really about embracing all of it, embracing the scars, embracing the ugliness.”
No longer do the demons under his bed scare Pierson; instead, he’s become friends with them, taking control of who tells whom what to do, no longer letting them take charge. “I guess I've learned to tell myself not to identify with the depression, anxiety, or trauma. Whether it's the brain trauma or anything emotional of any kind, I am the victor of that situation, not the victim. I fought and I won. I'm still alive today. I’m able to say right now I'm going to choose to chase my dream, and I think that's pretty special. So it's really a matter for me to try my best not to ever identify with those things and make them part of me, but to identify the opposite. If that makes any sense.”
In chasing his dream, I’m curious about how he manages to put his health first when the long days often take priority. “That part can be really difficult. You know I’ve dealt with chronic insomnia my whole life, and I've been working with my neurologist and cognitive behavioral therapist for years to really improve that, so pieces of my life don’t fall apart. That aspect of it, where you need sleep, you need to recover, you need these things, and you don't realize that sleep is one of those things where your brain and that depression and a lot of that anxiety can be helped.” It seems Pierson views the learning process as a tool —an opportunity to practice and maintain both his physical and mental health. However, he credits his loved ones for keeping him honest, vulnerable, and focused.
As we dip our toes into the pool of joy and what brings those all-important moments to his life, it’s a wide breadth of factors that keep him smiling on a daily basis, from his favourite daily tasks like a morning cold plunge (which he calls the act of doing something difficult) to those moments where everything just clicks on set. But when he’s not Pierson Fodé, the actor, producer, model, I wonder what connects him to who he is at his core. “There are so many things that keep me grounded. I think it is the farm, even though I'm not back there very often. Spending time with my family, throwing bales, feeding the cows, and hanging out with my family. My parents keep me really grounded. I try to talk to them a couple of times a week. My family and friends. I think when we get old or when we die, most of this stuff we don't get to take with us. But if there is a heaven, or anything after this, at the very least, the one thing I do take with me is all the memories of the people that I care about. And I think that is the thing that I always hold on to. So when I start to get a little intense about things, a little unfocused, and lose sight of what's really important, I keep that in my back pocket to go back to.
Words Alice Gee @alicesgee
Photography Kevin Sikorski @escaperealife
Styling Ashley Pruitt @ashleypruittstylist
Grooming Danni Katz @dannidoesit
Creative Alice Gee @alicesgee & Kevin Sikorski @escaperealife
