Sonya Balmores

Former Miss Teen Hawaii Sonya Balmores successfully vaulted from the pageant world to modeling and acting, first as a teenaged star in "Beyond the Break" (The N 2006-2009) and "Soul Surfer," and later, as a poised adult in action-oriented projects like "Inhumans" (ABC, 2017-). Born in Kalaheo, Hawaii, Balmores began acting while still a teenager and student at Kauai High School. She appeared as a surfer in the Fox TV pilot "The Break" (2003), but her real vehicle to stardom came the following year, when she was named Miss Teen Hawaii. Balmores would represent Hawaii at the Miss Teen USA pageant in the summer of 2004, where she placed first runner-up behind winner Shelley Henning. The exposure of her pageant run led to modeling work for magazines like Women's Health, as well as a return to acting in The N series "Beyond the Break," which made good use of her surfing skills to play one of a quartet of aspiring pro surfers. But after making her feature film debut as a highly competitive surfer in "Soul Surfer" (2011), a biopic about surfer Bethany Hamilton, Balmores took a three-year break from acting before returning in 2014 to work on episodic TV, including "Hawaii Five-0" (CBS, 2010-). In 2017, she earned what was perhaps her most prominent role to date - the yellow-skinned superhuman Auran, who possessed parabolic hearing, on ABC's "Inhumans," an episodic adaptation of the popular Marvel Comics series about a hidden race of powerful beings. She followed this with a supporting role in the independent crime thriller "Den of Thieves" (2018), starring Gerard Butler and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson.