Five years after her movie debut in Clueless, Bilderback played bitchy but ultimately harmless Whitney, who eventually proves to be a team player.
Bring It On was her biggest movie but she has steadily worked in film and TV, including a recurring role as Heather on Dawson’s Creek, followed by House, Heroes, Cold Case, Numb3rs, Castle, The Mentalist, Bones, NCIS: New Orleans and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. An expert in martial arts as well as a trained dancer, Bilderback has done all of her own stunts through the years.
Bilderback, who is Korean-American, told Huffington Post in 2018, “The majority of the roles that I’ve portrayed have been roles that were either intended for Caucasian actresses or the ethnicity wasn’t specified. So for me, I got lucky in the sense of I wasn’t really typecast as just an Asian actress. And I think a lot of that had to do with the timing. I was one of the first. It was like me, Lucy Liu, Lindsay Price and one or two other actresses who are still working today.”
Asked what it was like continuing to audition at that point in her career, Bilderback (who read for Crazy Rich Asians but didn’t get it) replied, “I’ve always been very fortunate. I’ve always worked. But it’s, for me personally, getting to the next level that I thought I would have already been at by now.”
“This year has been a really beautiful, big breakthrough year for me because I returned to writing,” she continued. “I wrote a half-hour, single-camera sitcom pilot, kind of loosely about my life, really. I’m also producing now. I’m producing my first feature film. I had to realize, ‘Oh, wait a minute, there’s than one way of becoming a successful actress and reaching the success that I’ve always known I was meant to reach, other than just through auditioning.”
