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Some actors might have been a little put out to audition for the role of the beautiful young romantic lead, and instead be cast as her mother, but not Katie Leung. “Absolutely not,” she says with a laugh. “I look young for my age – as most people in the west think Asians do – but I felt really seen to finally get to play the role of a mother.” She is a mother, she points out, and anyway, the role of Lady Araminta Gun, the steely aristo who is about to rock the new series of Netflix’s Regency behemoth Bridgerton, is so delicious, who could be insulted?
Araminta, widowed, has seen off two husbands, and now she’s trying to marry off her two teenage daughters, ideally to a Bridgerton, while keeping her stepdaughter, Sophie, in her place – as a Cinderella-style servant for the family. “The showrunners reassured me that it wasn’t going to be the archetypal evil stepmother role,” says Leung. “They wanted to find the humanity in Araminta. They wanted to ensure I knew her background, her struggles, why she makes these decisions, and why she’s so formidable.”
She is, though, from the four episodes I’ve seen, pretty evil to Sophie. Leung agrees. “The thing about her, and with so many of the characters in Bridgerton, is they do these awful things, they make mistakes, they’re human. When you see the final episode, you might think differently, and that’s wonderful, because normally you don’t get to do that with these ‘evil’ characters. Her drive comes from love and protection for her daughters. I get it, having become a mum,” she says – her son has recently turned three. “You will do anything for your kids. I don’t think I would have felt that way before.”
What is it like to join a show as big as Bridgerton? “I feel really blessed, genuinely,” she says. She is used to huge productions – her first role was Cho Chang in the Harry Potter films. “It feels quite familiar, in a sense. Also I’m older, and at a place in my life where I’m not too fazed going into something seemingly so huge.” The Harry Potter films coincided with the rise of social media and extreme online fandom – something the stars of Bridgerton have also had to deal with, much of it intense, appalling and racist.
If Leung is concerned, she doesn’t show it. She went through it with Harry Potter, and to some extent with Arcane, the animated Netflix show based on the League of Legends video game universe, in which she voices a character. Leung says she has learned to have a healthy distance from the noise surrounding her job. “I still care about the craft [of acting], I still want to do well, but I can park it once I’m done for the day and go home and live this other life. It’s more like a job for me than the be-all and end-all, which is how I felt about acting when I was in my 20s.”
Leung seems grounded and thoughtful. She has campaigned to raise awareness of sexual violence against women, and on Instagram she is as likely to post about the horrors in Gaza as her own work. We talk about the rise of the far right, and watching anti-immigrant rhetoric spread throughout the UK. It’s frightening, she says: “I feel as if I’ve experienced it, in the supermarket, in day-to-day life. I’m very aware that I live in a bubble in London, because if there’s anywhere that’s diverse, it’s London.” In her area, especially, she says, “there’s a real sense of community and inclusion and all these things, and even then, I’m experiencing it. I’m concerned. And it’s not just Britain, it’s all over the world.”
Leung grew up moving between various towns in Scotland, because of her father’s job running a wholesale business. She became an actor by accident. She didn’t even do plays at school, except one production of the musical Bugsy Malone, and even then she appeared as a dancer. Her father spotted an open audition for Harry Potter and suggested it to Leung. She was less interested in landing the role than in getting her divorced parents in the same room for the first time in years – as her mother would accompany them to the audition.
“My mum and dad hadn’t seen each other for a long time, but I was really excited, because I guess in my 16-year-old mind there was still a possibility that they might get back together.” She smiles. When she took part in the audition in London, the first three Harry Potter films had already been huge, and it felt like there were thousands of people queueing outside, she says. She thought she had no chance of getting it.
Leung’s parents split up when she was three, and her mother, who worked in finance, went to live in Hong Kong. Leung and her brother were raised by their father (he remarried, and she also has younger siblings). “To be honest, it was my grandmother who really raised me. My dad was working full-time.” It must have been hard, and fairly unusual, to grow up without her mother around. “Yeah,” says Leung, carefully. “It’s such a huge part of my identity, it’s not something I can ignore and say it didn’t have a huge impact on my life. But because I’m really happy with where I am and who I am, [although there is] obviously still lots of work to be done, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Leung and her mother were in touch throughout her childhood, and have a good relationship now, she says.
How did she deal with the extreme and sudden fame that came with Harry Potter? “I don’t think I did,” she says. “It was overwhelming from the get-go. Being in the spotlight from that age, when you’re already insecure, was difficult, to say the least.” She’s more aware of it now, she says, looking back. “At the time, I was having a lot of fun. I thought: this is different from school, and I really did not enjoy school. So it was a way to escape. I’m still trying to figure it out, really, how it affected me.”
The young actors were looked after, she says, even if conversations about mental health, and particularly the impact on young stars, weren’t as advanced as they are today. “I don’t know if anything could have been done back then to make things better or easier,” she says. “At that age, you’re curious. I remember being very curious about what people were saying about me, and I was Googling myself. Nobody could have stopped me, because I was old enough to make up my own mind.”
What she found online was horrendous racism and hurtful personal comments. How did she cope with that? “I didn’t. I think it just sat with me, and it affected me in ways like, ‘Oh yeah, I made that decision because people were saying this about me.’ It probably made me less outgoing. I was very self-aware of what was coming out of my mouth.” It didn’t help, she says, that being catapulted into this successful career meant she felt she hadn’t earned it. “It happened by pure chance,” she says, underplaying her talent, as if it had been a lottery. “And for the longest time, I may have tried to make up for it, and overcompensate.”
Leung was in the last five films of the series. “I remember coming out of it and thinking, ‘Nothing’s going to beat it,’ because it was so successful. I remember being lost, going, ‘What’s next? People will have these high expectations of me topping it, and it’s never going to happen.’ I think I was so afraid of meeting these expectations that I gave up, or didn’t give myself the chance, after it, to try and continue acting.” She started a degree in photography, but towards the end of her studies, got a part in a play. On stage, she remembers thinking, “No, actually, this is what I want to do.”
She went on to study drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Did she feel conscious that she was the actor from Harry Potter? “Oh my God, yes, absolutely. I tried really hard not to mention it, even when we were doing introductions at the beginning of the year, even though everybody knew. I didn’t want people to think that was the reason I got in. Not that it was, but I was really hard on myself. I was trying to constantly prove I was more than just the actor from Harry Potter.” (The films, she stresses, are “such a huge part of where I came from, and I’m grateful for it, and it still resonates with a lot of people”.)
For a long time after drama school, Leung was mainly considered for roles that were “these kind of epic tales of the east, whether that be North Korea or China. Deep, dark subject matters.” In the BBC drama One Child, she played the child of a Chinese mother, adopted by a British-American couple; and in Channel 4’s Run, an unauthorised migrant. She enjoyed these roles, she says, “and it gave me the chance to be more knowledgable about the world, and the injustices that happen around us all the time”. But it also felt limiting. “It’s one of these things where just because there weren’t many roles out there, I was incredibly grateful to be considered. A large part of that was me, again, giving myself a hard time, thinking I wasn’t deserving of anything.”
She remembers the end of school, and the yearbook in which people had written who they thought their fellow students would become; Leung was described as the next Lucy Liu, the Hollywood actor. “Obviously I’m a huge fan of Lucy Liu, she’s had great longevity in her career, but that irked me. I remember thinking, why not Meryl Streep? I was kind of restricted by my race, and I guess Lucy Liu was the only other Asian actor that was, at the time, on the big screen.”
What would it have meant to Leung to see a lead – in Bridgerton, Yerin Ha plays her stepdaughter, Sophie, whose storyline, and potential romance with Benedict Bridgerton, powers the fourth season – who looked like her, in one of the biggest shows in the world, when she was growing up? “I’m envious of the younger generation who are getting to see people that represent them on screens now,” she says. “I know it would have done me good.”
When she works with younger actors such as Ha, does she get a sense that their experience has been different from hers? “We’re still a long way away from where we need to be. It’s better, but it’s not as good as it needs to be. I really admire the younger generation because they are more self-aware and they express themselves in a way that I, once upon a time, did not. Even now, I’m working on myself, to say what I need, whether it’s in a relationship or at the workplace, with my mum or my partner. It’s really fundamental to having any good relationship with anybody.”
Leung thinks the quirky BBC crime drama Annika might have been the first time she was cast in a role where her ethnicity wasn’t relevant (though her Scottishness was, playing a detective with Glasgow’s Marine Homicide Unit). Progress has been slow, but it is happening, she says. “We’re getting there, and especially with a role like Araminta in Bridgerton, being able to play a mother who has daughters – this kind of family dynamic is something I feel is always lacking. That’s where we need to try and get to now.” As opposed, she says, to the smaller, incidental roles – a journalist, say, or a social worker – “who has no ties to the rest of the cast. Because it is all about relationships.”
Bridgerton’s famously diverse cast has changed the landscape for period drama. “Their inclusion and diversity behind and in front of the camera is just …” Leung smiles. “You can see it and feel it, and that made me feel really safe to be able to kind of play as an actor.” Still, disappointingly, but not unsurprisingly, Bridgerton’s “colour-conscious” casting has been criticised. Will we ever get to the point when a show can do this, and not be? “The more we can have it, the less of a thing it becomes. But for now, we’re kind of in the middle of it,” says Leung. But it goes to show that it works. “The reason it’s successful is because the writing is great, the directing is great, the acting, the relationships between the characters.”
Next, Leung is about to film another role in Scotland, which she can’t say much about, except it’s an interesting role with a “kind of flexibility for me to play with it, so I’m really excited”. She has reached a point, she says, where she no longer questions whether she deserves her career. “I know who I am. I know what I can do.”
