Hailee Steinfeld’s Ethnicity and Family Roots

Mother’s side

The Filipino line goes back to her great-grandfather Peter Domasin, who came from Bohol, an island province in the central Philippines. His son Ricardo is Steinfeld’s grandfather on her mother’s side.^[2] Peter Domasin was born in the Philippines in 1904. In 1928 he married Evelyn Olivia Bain, who was born in Los Angeles, and the couple had seven children. He died in Los Angeles in 1967.^[4] Ricardo was born in Los Angeles in 1938 and died in Glendale in 2014.^[5]

In April 2016 she traveled to the Philippines for the first time, for a series of concerts in Manila. At a press conference there she said she had learned early on how much passion and pride there is in being Filipino, and that so far from home she felt at home.^[2] She returned to the topic on television in 2019 and spoke about sharing some of the same DNA with the people around her in the Philippines.^[1]

Researching her roots for Sinners

In Ryan Coogler’s 2025 film Sinners, set in the American South of the 1930s, Steinfeld plays Mary, a woman of mixed race. Part of her preparation was learning more about her own family history, which led to long conversations with her mother and other relatives. She has said she wishes her late grandfather were still alive to answer the questions the film raised.^[1]