No matter what happens to me and my career in the future, Berlin is always going to be my hometown.
No, [as a child I didn't feel like a refugee] at all. I remember my German wasn't that good yet when I was in primary school and because of that, maybe I wasn't as well-integrated as other children. But when I went to primary school this was no longer the case. It was only much later, when I was 15, 16, that I visited Romania again for the first time. This was when I asked myself questions: Why am I the way I am? How much about me is German, which things about me are Romanian?
I don't remember [when I first visited the Berlin Zoological Garden]. To me, it was important that [in Germany] I could drink Coca Cola. In Romania, my father had bought me a bottle every now and then. To me, that was something really special. And mom and dad always told me, 'We are going somewhere you can drink as much Coke as you want'. To this day, Coke means so much more to me.
That was really strange, having to come up with a new surname [when my agent deemed my birth name too hard for people to remember]. After a long decision making process, me and my parents agreed on Lara because that was the name that sounded the most beautiful.
[I typically start my day with] coffee and a cigarette... Smoking is terrible, to smoke a cigarette as the first thing in the day is the worst thing you can do to yourself... I want to stop smoking, I have smoked almost a pack a day, you see, since I was 16. I told my parents immediately. They always wanted me to be honest with them... my father accepted my promise not to smoke more than two or three cigarettes a day. But unfortunately it didn't quite work out.
I had already been one of the uncool students in my class and had few friends. But once you could see me on the TV, I was even more uncool.