Lea Salonga, Tony Award-winning actress, Broadway legend, Disney princess twice over, is smiling at her laptop screen from her place in New York. She looks well-rested—lively, chatty, her signature short hair framing a face untouched by the strain of long-haul flights or late-night rehearsals. She has, by her own admission, “gotten a little bit of rest” since closing Old Friends in Los Angeles. But rest is relative. When we spoke a couple of weeks ago, she had a few days off before returning to the Broadway stage.

On the day of the interview, she is savoring the sunlight outside her window and reflecting on something rare: playing a villain.

Salonga has spent much of her career inhabiting heroines—women of resilience, grace, and moral clarity. Kim in Miss Saigon, Éponine and Fantine in Les Misérables, the singing voices of Princess Jasmine and Mulan. When audiences see Lea Salonga, they expect a certain nobility. A protagonist. A woman to root for.

That is not what they will get in The Cleaning Lady.

“It’s fun to play the villain,” Salonga says, grinning like a kid who has just learned how to swear. “It’s fun to play somebody who isn’t nice. It’s almost as if there really are no parameters, no boundaries, there are no limits. Because villains don’t have limits.”

Her character—a Filipina American woman of influence who wears passive-aggressiveness like a favorite shawl—arrives with the polished exterior of someone who runs a respectable operation. She is polite. Measured. But her pleasantness is a mirage. “She comes across as kind of nice at the beginning,” Salonga says, eyes narrowing slightly. “And that kind of is a giveaway that, oh, something is up with this woman.”

There is a familiar type of cruelty in this role, one that Salonga recognizes. It is not the cartoonish villainy of a cackling Disney sorceress, nor the brutal, unsubtle malice of an outright criminal. It is something sharper, quieter, more insidious. “It’s hard being able to admit it, but maraming tayong kilalang kababayan na ganun,” she says. Her character looks down on undocumented Filipinos in America, like the hardworking mother and son in the show played by Martha Millan and Sean Lew. “We know people like this.”

Which means playing the role comes with a particular challenge: how to make an audience understand someone they are meant to despise. “I have to employ the basic rules of empathy,” she explains, “and try to figure out where this woman is coming from, why she is the way that she is.” She pauses. “What makes her so seemingly irredeemable?”

On set, she is not the only one stepping outside of expectations. Her co-star Sean Lew, best known as a dancer and choreographer, delivers a performance that impresses even Salonga, who has seen her fair share of breakout talents. “He’s incredible,” she says. “And he also trains and teaches K-pop idols—he flies to South Korea and choreographs.” She shakes her head, as if still processing the breadth of his career. “He’s a multi-hyphenate, and I’m sure he’s going to be one of these people that conquers the world before he even turns 30.”

She has been on the receiving end of such admiration as well. It is inevitable, given that she has, in many ways, paved the road that others now walk. She has spent decades being the one young performers look to, the one whose career says: Yes, it’s possible. Even for us.

She saw it happen recently, at Hadestown. The understudy for Orpheus, Timothy H. Lee, was on that night. After the show, when she went to see him, she remembers him saying to her that even when he was in Korea, he knew who she was, and that her career has inspired him to want to be a performer.

Salonga tilts her head slightly as she recounts this moment, as if still trying to absorb the weight of it. It is not the first time someone has said this to her, nor will it be the last. But she does not take it lightly.

The nature of her work means she is never in one place for long. She works a lot in the U.S., but Manila is never far from her mind. She goes back to visit her mother, to spend the holidays, to work. “I love getting to work in Manila,” she says. “I love being able to see my friends that do what I do, and to just laugh and share joy and art and be able to just sing.”

And sometimes, she returns with contraband.

“For my fellow BTS Army girlfriends,” she says, grinning, “it means bringing home merch that they might not be able to get over there.”

This is the version of Lea Salonga that has endured over decades—a performer of precision and skill, yes, but also a woman of enthusiasm, curiosity, and unexpected mischief. A woman who will fangirl over Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Gilbert (she’s married to The Cleaning Lady’s Director/Executive Producer Timothy Busfield), who will stop mid-story to marvel at a dancer’s ability to shape a K-pop idol’s career, who will step into the shoes of an antagonist and immediately wonder: What broke this woman? What made her this way?

And, most importantly, how fun it is to play someone who doesn’t have to be perfect.