For Mika Abdalla, anxiety has a silver lining

If you Google Allie Hayes, you’re met with a “Did you mean: JLo of the new generation?”—a cheeky reference to the character’s viral ‘On the Floor’ moment in Off Campus. Allie is a scene-stealer, bursting with energy whenever you see her. She’s the outgoing best friend, relentlessly upbeat, uninhibited and beaming with positivity. Our September-October cover star, Mika Abdalla, who plays her, finds the character familiar, often describing Allie as a version of herself “after 4 Red Bulls.”

On set, Abdalla has a slightly different way of managing all that energy. Before stepping into character, she grounds herself. “I think about what my feet feel like on the ground and focus on putting my heels down. If I’m stressed, I tend to be stepping on my toes.” The habit comes from horseback riding, which she took up as a child at a barn down the road from her home in Dallas, Texas. “If you freak out on a horse, you start scrunching up your knees and pointing your toes trying to hold on, which freaks the horse out. Horses are extremely intuitive animals. They can feel your heartbeat, your breath and they can definitely feel where your energy is placed in your body,” she says. “Horseback riding really taught me to control my body’s response to stress.”

It’s a lesson Abdalla has had plenty of opportunity to practise. “I was really, really anxious as a kid,” she says. She wonders if some of it came from being an only child, the eldest of her cousins and the daughter of parents who were the first among their friends to have children. She was, consequently, often surrounded by adults. “I grew up really fast. I never had any childlike wonder. I was never naive, which is good, and I’m grateful for that. But because I was so aware of the world and the way that people are at such a young age, I never learned how to chill.”

Abdalla first walked on set at the age of six for a local parenting magazine photoshoot in Dallas. “I wore a purple polka dot dress, they curled my hair and put some blush on me. I had so much fun. I felt like a little doll.” Shortly after the purple dress came a purple dinosaur: Abdalla made her acting debut on Barney & Friends in 2008. Suddenly, she was spending even more time around adults, only now they were directors, producers and crew members. “Growing up around so many adults did make it easier for me to do my job.”

Photographed by Agata Serge