Basic HTML Version
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Wok Star
AT HER FAMILY’S RESTAURANT
BACK HOME, TV ACTRESS KATIE LECLERC
FINDS HERSELF IN A FAMILIAR ROLE
Katie Leclerc, the 25-year-old star of ABC
Family’s runaway hit “Switched at Birth,” is
cooking lunch for her family at FireWok, their
Chinese restaurant in north San Antonio.
She darts from counter to stove, tossing
freshly cut vegetables and tangy ginger into
awok. Then, raising her armdramatically, she
dashes it all with broth and laughs as steam
envelops her. “This is where I learned to cook,
right here, doing shi s a er high school,” she
says. “And when I come home from L.A. to
visit, my dad putsme back towork. No free
rides! But I love it.”
Family is a big theme in “Switched
at Birth,” which launched its second
season earlier this year. The hourlong
drama is about two teenage girls
who discover they were acciden-
tally switched as newborns in the
hospital, andwho have ended up
in very different households.
Leclerc plays one of the girls,
Daphne Vasquez, who is deaf,
and it’s a role she’s suited for in
more ways than one: Leclerc has
suffered from Meniere’s disease, a
degenerative ear disorder that causes
intermi ent hearing loss and vertigo,
for the past five years.
Butwhile Leclerc has guest-starred
on the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory”
as a deaf character and recently served on
a panel at the Federal Partners in Bullying
Prevention Summit in Washington, D.C.,
she doesn’t intend to become typecast. “I
would love to do an action movie,” Leclerc
says, as she de ly tops off the dish with hoi-
sin sauce. Her father pokes his head into the
restaurant’s kitchen and nods his approval
before taking the plates to the assembled
uncles and cousins.
Leclerc pauses to take a breather. “I
wouldn’t mind becoming a top chef, either,”
she says.
—SCOTT ANDREWS
BOARDING PASS
Whether you’re headed
to San Antonio to enjoy celebrity-prepared
Chinese food or just to stroll the River Walk
and visit the Alamo, let United get you there.
26
MARCH 2012
•
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
p026_HEM0312_Dispatches.indd 26
02/0