Kat Hoyos plays her mum in documentary about her escape from Columbia
THERE aren’t many roles that an actor can say they were born to play. Rising Aussie star Kat Hoyos took on her most important role when she played her mother in a documentary about her real-life escape from Colombia before Hoyos was born.
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THERE aren’t many roles that an actor can say they were born to play. Rising Aussie star Kat Hoyos — best known for her role as selfie queen Layla in TV comedy Here Come The Habibs — has played a few characters onscreen but her most important role came when she played her mother in a documentary about her real-life escape from Colombia before Hoyos was born.
The 27-year-old spent months working with her mother on her life story, one which saw her escape her home country in fear of her life.
“About four years ago some graduates from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School were looking for stories to document and I reached out to them with my mum’s story,” Hoyos tells BW Magazine.
“Mum’s story was re-created as a documentary, the first half featuring an interview with me and mum and the second half as a dramatisation of her story where I played mum. That experience was really emotional for both of us, I could see mum watching me and I was watching her watching me and we were both getting upset.
“It was so surreal.”
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The story of her mother Natalie’s escape from Colombia wasn’t known to Hoyos until about five years ago.
She says when she reached her teens, she began to ask more questions about her family and her father, who her mother always said died in a construction site accident.
The truth was like a plot ripped right from the smash Netflix hit Narcos, which chronicles the rise of the cocaine trade in Colombia.
“My grandfather was a politician in Colombia and mum was brought up in a privileged household,” Hoyos says.
“When she met my dad, he was considered a ‘bad boy’ and he was involved in the drug world but mum rebelled against the family and got into a relationship with him and married him.
“It turned out to be an emotionally abusive relationship and it ended up a situation where she was practically held captive by him.
“She tried to escape a few times and eventually she did, ending up in a hospital because my dad had hit her.
“The doctor and my grandfather created a plan to get her into hiding and my grandfather organised for a visa to take her to Australia because that was the furthest location they could think of for her to safely go to.
“She landed in Australia with just her suitcase and an English dictionary because she barely spoke English and she didn’t know anyone. Shortly after arriving here she discovered she was pregnant with me.”
Another aspect Hoyos didn’t learn until she was an adult is that she spent the first few years of her life in a detention centre in Melbourne because her mother had accidentally overstayed her tourist visa.
Her mother was first tempted to tell her story five years ago when Sutherland Shire library was running a living books program and she had the opportunity to share her life publicly for the first time.
The positive feedback she got was a little like therapy and Hoyos says the seed to chronicle her life’s events in a memoir was born.
“Mum’s in the process of purging all her memories onto the computer and then I’ll look at it and help her flesh it out, help her describe smells, rooms, scenes in more detail, which I have had experience in through acting,” Hoyos says.
“I’ve been playing coach and daughter through this whole process because my mum still feels a lot of guilt, shame and humiliation for maybe making bad decisions in her past which led to people she loves being hurt.
“It’s a very personal process for me and we still have a way to go with it; it’s like she’s rediscovering memories but I’m also learning things about her I never knew.
“It has also brought us closer together. I tell my mum all the time how proud I am of her and how amazing I think she is.”
It’s not the only project Hoyos is focusing on. She appears in the comedy-drama Chasing Comets, on screens now, as the reverend’s daughter Dee.
And she’s developing an online course for performing arts students and graduates becoming professional actors.
“I had four years of performing arts education and about an hour of that was dedicated to practical things like what’s an ABN and how do I get a head shot,” Hoyos says.
“I saw a niche there and took it. I want to create a comfortable and safe place for these young people to turn to for practical information.”