Yerin Ha didn’t know if she’d get a reply on Instagram. After landing the role of Sophie Baek in Bridgerton’s fourth season and becoming the series’ first Korean lead—and second Asian lead, after Simone Ashley played Kate Sharma in Season 2—she considered sending a message to Ashley. “I’m quite introverted, so I was like, she’s not going to know who I am,” Ha recalls. To her surprise, Ashley messaged her first. “She said, ‘I’m here for you if you need,’” Ha recalls.
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As the romantic interest of Benedict (Luke Thompson), the second eldest of the Bridgerton siblings, Ha joins a small group of women who have played the leads in Netflix’s record-shattering Regency-era series based on Julia Quinn’s novels—a position that brings with it high levels of public scrutiny. But she and Ashley share the unique experience of having the race of their characters changed in the adaptation, in keeping with Shonda Rhimes’ production company’s commitment to diverse storytelling. Bridgerton Season 2 reimagined Kate—who has pale skin and the surname Sheffield in The Viscount Who Loved Me—as Indian. And the upcoming season, which premieres in two parts on Jan. 29 and Feb. 26, introduces a Korean Sophie to play a character originally called Sophie Beckett.
Sophie’s arc is set to remain faithful to the original story. She meets Benedict at a masquerade ball she’s sneaked into, and he’s instantly enamored. Sophie has no plans to reveal who she is behind the mask, however: she is both a lowly maid and the illegitimate daughter of an earl.
Ha never thought she’d get top billing when she sent her audition tape. It’s roughly two months before her season’s premiere, and we’re sitting in a lounge at a Manhattan hotel as she looks back. “When my agent told me it was for Bridgerton, I thought it was a supporting role,” says the Sydney-based actor, 27. “Then I realized, oh no, this is for the lead. They’re going to cast an East Asian woman for the lead.”
The Bridgerton team was intent on exactly that. “We are always looking to expand the show’s representation of its audience,” says Jess Brownell, who has served as showrunner since Season 3. “We take stock of the world as we have it.” Though she and the casting team didn’t watch Ha’s tape until late in the process, it was instantly clear they had found their Sophie. “In order to balance out Benedict, who has seen and done everything, we needed a character who had a bit of an old soul,” Brownell explains. But it was also paramount that she have a playful spirit. “Even though Yerin is in her 20s, you believe she’s lived a lot of life. Her internal world feels very rich,” says Brownell. She also describes Ha as reminiscent of “a modern-day Lucille Ball,” with a natural humor and physicality.
It took Ha longer to wrap her mind around the role. “I never saw myself as a leading lady for a romantic show,” she says. She attributes this sense of impostor syndrome largely to the lack of female, Asian romantic leads she saw in Hollywood growing up—“unless it’s Mulan, where it’s all Asian people.” While films and series that center Asian characters have become more plentiful—from Shogun to Beef to Everything Everywhere All at Once—few are in the romance genre. “When you don’t have much exposure, sometimes you feel like your dreams are limited,” Ha says.
The actor remembers the Korean video store she frequented in Sydney when she was young. Her dad would rent Korean dramas, and the two watched them as she learned the language. Ha’s face lights up as she talks about two favorites. “Secret Garden with Hyun Bin. Iconic,” she beams, referencing the 2010 rom-com about a CEO falling in love with a stuntwoman. She also loved Boys Over Flowers, the 2009 series in which an heir falls for a dry cleaner’s daughter. Both are Cinderella stories like Bridgerton’s fourth season. “A lot of K-dramas deal with class—the rich mom doesn’t approve of the lower-class girl,” Ha says. These shows were in mind as she began filming Sophie’s story.
But K-dramas were the exception. Growing up in a mostly white suburb, Ha rarely saw faces like hers, around her and in media. “When I realized I wanted to be an actress, I didn’t think I could do it in Australia. [I thought] I had to go to Korea,” she says. Ha isn’t the first member of her family to be a performer. Her grandma, Son Sook, is a seasoned actor in Korea, and her grandpa Kim Seong-ok also acted. So, at 15, Ha moved to Korea and spent three years at a rigorous performing-arts school.
During her senior year, Ha began to reconsider whether she needed to stay in Korea to find work. In Hollywood, she observed, “It didn’t feel like [Asian actors] were just playing the convenience-store manager or a prostitute.” Her route there led back to Sydney, and the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), whose alumni include Cate Blanchett, Baz Luhrmann, and Sarah Snook.
Her instincts about Hollywood proved correct, because she quickly landed a role as part of the main cast of Halo, the Paramount+ series based on the military sci-fi video game. “I’m aware that it is a rare situation,” Ha says of the speed at which she booked that gig. She later appeared in Dune: Prophecy, HBO’s prequel series. “I always knew I didn’t want Australia to be my end goal. I was aiming for Hollywood because they’re a bit ahead of the game in terms of the stories they tell,” she says, “and who they cast.”
Finding Ha was only the first step in telling Benedict and Sophie’s love story. Once Brownell knew the show’s next lead was going to be East Asian, her team collaborated with the nonprofit CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment) on an authentic portrayal. CAPE offered a primer on stereotypes of East Asian women to avoid. “We wanted to be mindful of not oversexualizing the character or making the character overly submissive,” Brownell says.
Bridgerton has been praised for intimate scenes filmed with the female gaze in mind. “But the intimacy stems from a place of pure connection between two people,” Ha adds. “It’s about being seen on the inside, and then the passion can explode inside-out, rather than outside-in.” The creators purposefully chose not to over-index on Sophie’s Korean identity. While they were thoughtful to accurately present her ethnicity, it’s not central to the story. “What’s so beautiful about [our version of] Benedict and Sophie’s story is that we don’t really dive into, ‘Oh, you’re Korean,’” she says. “He just sees Sophie as Sophie.”
This was a distinction from Ashley’s season. “With the Sharmas, it made sense to include ceremonies and clothing that reference Kate’s heritage because she grew up in India,” Brownell says. But Sophie is different. “We know her parents and probably her grandparents and herself grew up in England. We found small ways to represent her Korean heritage. But I think this character, in many ways, would identify as British.”
Ha says Sophie’s wit and humor jumped off the page when she first read the series’ third novel, An Offer From a Gentleman. But she was also moved by Sophie’s trauma. “I’m so heartbroken for her,” Ha says. “But also I can relate—feeling less than and not deserving.” She’s learning to accept that her impostor syndrome may never fully go away. “I think that’s a very Asian thing: ‘You need to do better, work twice as hard,’” she shares. Her parents were supportive, “but when you’re living in an Asian family in a Western country, to be seen, to be heard, takes sometimes twice as much energy [as it does for] other people.”
Ha has felt particularly inspired by Sophie’s self-assuredness. Despite being viewed as inferior within the show’s mannered universe, she’s not afraid to ask for more. “[Sophie] knows her worth,” Ha says. “She doesn’t say yes to everything just because it’s going to make her life easier.” Ha’s mentality used to be “I’m lucky to be in the room. Now, “I’m learning how to stand my ground.”
That self-assuredness was particularly necessary in Bridgerton’s prominent intimacy scenes. “With an Asian background, it’s really harsh—we constantly talk about getting skinnier,” Ha says, acknowledging that thinness is idealized in Western beauty standards too. Playing Sophie prompted her to consider what being comfortable in her own skin looks like. “There is no such thing as perfection,” Ha says. “Growing up, just thinking, I don’t have eyebrows, or my eyelashes are straight—you see things that so many other people do not,” she says. “It’s really a shift in mindset of ‘This is what I have been given in this lifetime. How am I going to accept it?’”
The music is getting louder in the lounge we’re chatting in, but Ha continues in a gentle tone. Though she’s about to be thrust into the largest spotlight of her career, she speaks with the ease of someone who’s navigated fame for decades. And while this role has encouraged Ha to embrace her present self, it also has her imagining greater things for her future. While Sophie has a pragmatic approach to life, she’s complemented by Benedict, a dreamy idealist. Before, Ha says, “I was too grounded in reality of what was in the past.” But she’s done relegating herself to supporting roles only. “I realized maybe I hadn’t dreamt big enough.”
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