Six Things To Know About '13 Reasons Why' Star Alisha Boe

In an interview with W magazine last year, Boe revealed that she’d originally auditioned for the role of Hannah on 13 Reasons Why. She was later asked to audition for the role of Jessica, which she says she “disconnected with it.” “She’s supposed to be a pretty, popular teenager, and in my head, just from being brainwashed from all these breakdowns growing up, it’s a blonde girl with blue eyes,” she told the magazine. Thankfully, Brian Yorkey, who adapted the story for TV, and the casting execs wanted an inclusive cast and persuaded Boe to take the role. “It was my first time being able to be separated from being someone’s best friend, or being the butt of the joke, or an accessory. It was a dream come true for me.”

In an MTV UK interview, Boe dished that she once went by the username FierceEuroChick97.

We’ve all had a crush on a fictional character—you’re lying if you say you haven’t—and Boe’s crush was on Nickelodeon’s Danny Phantom. In the Danny Phantom series, a lab accident turns Danny Fenton into a ghost-hunting superhero named Danny Phantom. Of course, tons of action and hijinks ensue.

Boe told a fan during an interview on TRL that the semicolon is a nod to Project Semicolon, a nonprofit organization that focuses on mental health wellness and efforts to prevent suicide. “It’s to stand in solidarity with people who have suicidal thoughts, have gone through depression, and addiction issues.”

Boe, who was born and raised in Oslo, Norway, later moved to Los Angeles when her mother remarried. She got her start performing in Oslo and continued to do so in LA, before taking a break as a teenager. In the same W interview, the actress told the publication that she would often be sent to audition for Hispanic or Asian roles because ” it just wasn’t inclusive then for mixed or ethnically ambiguous or black people, in general.” She added that identity “played a really big role in my life.” As a Norwegian-Somali actress living in LA, Boe says she went to a predominantly white high school, where she struggled with her Blackness. “People would look at me and say, ‘Alisha, you’re pretty for a black girl.’ Then I thought being black was wrong and I wanted to take away my blackness. And then going on these auditions, I have the upper hand, because I am the token black girl. They aren’t going to hire the lead girl on The CW to be a dark-skinned black girl; they’re going to want someone who looks like me. That’s why I was able to do all the Justice, Sears, and Target print work, because I was light-skinned with Caucasian hair. I understand that, but identity is still something that I am working out.”