When Katie Leung was cast in Bridgerton Season 4 in September, many Harry Potter fans experienced the same sequence of reactions. One: It’s Cho Chang! Then, two: Cho’s playing a mom — of teenagers? Leung, best known for her role as Harry’s first love interest in the film franchise, laughs off what she calls the “hoohah.” “In the Regency Era, [women] would have been married off in their teens so it’s perfectly plausible that I would have teens,” the Scottish actress, now 37, tells me over a video call. “Maybe it’s to do with ‘Asian don’t raisin,’ which is kind of partly true, but at the same time, it’s still a Western perspective, right? I don’t get my Asian mates coming to me saying I look 12.”
For Asian Americans like myself though, Leung’s casting as a mother is a reminder of how much time has passed since Harry Potter defined our adolescence. It also calls back memories of the significance of an on-screen idol at a time when characters who looked like us were few, and those that did failed to fully capture the essence of who we are. Cho was beautiful, a brilliant and popular Ravenclaw, athletically gifted as Seeker of her House’s Quidditch team, and pined after by the hero in a blockbuster film franchise. Now, nearly 20 years later, Leung’s upcoming Bridgerton turn and her current voice acting role in Arcane, an animated series inspired from Riot Games’ League Of Legends IP, feels like a long awaited welcome back party. And we are ready for it.
In Arcane Season 2, released on Netflix this month, Leung voices Caitlyn Kiramman, the daughter of a ruling family in Piltover who shirks her privileged background to join the policing Enforcers in search of justice and peace. But (major spoiler ahead if you haven’t finished Season 1) after the death of her mother at the hands of orphaned and tortured Zaunite Jinx, Caitlyn’s emotions and grief overtake her logic and put her on a path of vengeance and deeper into the class wars and military conflict between the two cities.
“As an actor, it was wonderful to find that kind of vulnerability and courage, which I think was always a part of Caitlyn, it was just maybe suppressed,” Leung, a former gamer, says. “I feel the core of her has remained the same, and that she believes in action rather than inaction. It’s just that she’s placed in a position where she has to make a choice. Or rather, there is no choice for her in Season 2, whereas in [Season] 1 she could have taken the easy route and she didn’t.”
The same could be said of Leung. The actress, who at age 13 beat out thousands of girls in an open audition for the role of Cho, shares that while she was grateful for the life-changing opportunity to star in the Harry Potter films, beginning with 2005’s Goblet Of Fire, it also made her second guess whether she really wanted to pursue acting as a career — or that she was worthy of taking on new roles. “In my head, I was putting myself in a box, and I thought the only reason why anyone would want to work with me was for [being in Harry Potter],” Leung reflects. “And until I got that out of my head, I just felt a bit stuck. I think many people do when they play iconic roles where people keep bringing it up even though you’ve done loads of other things. I was really drawn to people actually, who would say to me, ‘Oh, I’ve watched this thing that you’ve been in,’ which is not Harry Potter. Suddenly I wanted to be their best friend.”
Like many of us who were awkward teens and anxious 20-somethings, in her 30s, Leung found the self-assurance that made her feel comfortable enough to say to herself — and to other people — that acting was truly her passion. “I always wanted to [act]. I just didn’t have the balls or the courage to commit to it because I was afraid of failure,” Leung says. “I think it just comes with age. The older you get, the more you go, ‘Well, you’ve only got one shot and actually it’s not that deep.’”
”In my 20s, it was all or nothing,” she adds. “And it’s like, ‘Well actually, it does not have to be like that,’ and funnily enough, the more open you are to things coming your way, the more opportunities come.”
Despite the “ups and downs,” Leung says she’s at a place in her life where she is content with the journey her professional and personal life has taken since Cho. In the dozen years since the final Harry Potter film, Leung has been in a number of UK theater and TV productions, including her stage debut as Jung Chang in the play adaptation of Wild Swans, the lead role in BBC Two drama One Child, and more recently as a data analyst in Scottish crime series Annika. US audiences might have also caught a glimpse of her as Jackie Chan’s character’s daughter whose death in a terrorist attack prompts a sequence of vengeance in 2017’s The Foreigner.
The older you get, the more you go, ‘Well, you’ve only got one shot and actually it’s not that deep.’
Katie Leung
But Arcane and soon-to-be Bridgerton definitively marks Leung’s return to our screens in the States. While we don’t know too much about the Regency-era romance drama’s highly anticipated season, what we do know is Leung plays Lady Araminta Gun, an antagonist mother who schemes to marry off one of her two daughters to Benedict Bridgerton. Leung says she has embraced her “mother-slash-villain” era — including being a mom-minus-villain IRL — and when I chat with her, she’s in the middle of production so she can’t share too much. What she does tease, however, is enough to get you hyped. “I would never call her evil because I adore her — I think she’s absolutely fabulous. She’s just heavily misunderstood,” Leung says. “But if there’s anything that I can say, I mean, the costumes. They’re always brilliant on that show, but hers are something else.”
Bridgerton Season 4 will not only center East Asians as romantic leads — Yerin Ha will star as Benedict’s love interest Sophie Baek — but also, through Leung’s character, bring a much craved range of depictions of our culture, which includes insight into an Asian household. “There isn’t enough representation where we center around a family of Asians. Up until now, my career has consisted of … playing the role of a journalist who perhaps provides a lot of exposition. There’s no kind of family connections or ties to that person so I find that quite problematic because then it doesn’t require relatability. It doesn’t require anyone to really invest in that character, but when it comes to a family, the push and pull, the dynamics of families are universal.”
It might seem like a comeback for Leung, but I call it a resurgence, a reminder for so many of us Asian Americans of how far we’ve come since our teen years and, as we look back, to embrace the journey we took. And it seals what we’ve always known: that we should never doubt our potential.
“I’m just very excited to see what kind of opportunities these projects will bring,” Leung says. “And I feel the support from you guys, and it’s really beautiful.”
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This article was originally published on refinery29.com.