Yerin Ha on the set of Bridgerton season 4. Credit: GAVIN BOND/NETFLIX
Australian actor Yerin Ha was grocery shopping with her mum in the South Korean countryside when she got the first of two phone calls that would catapult her to worldwide stardom. Bridgerton was looking for a new leading lady, and they’d need her audition tape back within 24 hours.
Ha was excited. She had watched the show like everyone else during lockdowns, but she didn’t think much of her chances. Bridgerton was one of the most popular shows on the planet, with each season viewed about 100 million times. And though the Regency-era series is known for its racially diverse casting, almost every actor is British. Would they really go for a Korean-Australian NIDA grad from Turramurra with just five screen credits to her name?
Two weeks later, she had the part, plus a flight to London to start production. “My mum was with me again when we got the call,” Ha says. ”We’re just like peas in a pod, so if I’m crying, she’s crying. It was so nice to share.“
“We started watching season two together and, watching some of the [sexy] scenes, she’d be like, ‘Oh my God! Do you have to do that?’ … It just feels surreal that I’m a part of it,” she says, laughing.
Though Ha’s season is yet to air – or even finish filming – she’s already experiencing the force of the fandom. Her name was leaked to Variety just weeks after she found out about the casting, and the internet quickly went into meltdown. There were countless articles titled, “Who is Yerin Ha?”, cobbled together from her limited digital history (with one helpfully pointing out she’s a Cancer sun), a flood of discussion and fan art on Reddit, and romantic fancam edits of her and co-star Luke Thompson on YouTube.
With no footage available of the pair, one video splices Thompson from season three of Bridgerton with Ha in Bad Behaviour – a 2023 Stan miniseries in which she plays a bullied schoolgirl.
“Everything has been moving super quick,” the 29-year-old actor says via Zoom, on a rare day off production. “I try not to look too much, but it seems like the overall response has been really positive.
“Now I’m just like, ‘All right, let me do a good job shooting this show!’ I just want to do a really good job.”
Ha will star as Sophie Baek, the mysterious “Lady in Silver” who enchants Benedict Bridgerton (Thompson) at his mother’s masquerade ball in Bridgerton’s upcoming fourth season. The plot will loosely follow Julia Quinn’s Cinderella-inspired 2001 novel, An Offer from a Gentleman (which Ha is “slowly making [her] way through” alongside the new scripts).
“I didn’t grow up watching [period dramas] because I never related to the stories.”
In that story, Sophie is an illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Penwood, and sneaks out to attend the ball before fleeing in fear that Benedict won’t accept her true identity, leaving behind a single glove instead of a glass slipper.
Yerin Ha and Luke Thompson on the set of Bridgerton season 4.Credit: GAVIN BOND/NETFLIX
Notably, her surname in the book is Beckett; Baek is the Korean name that Ha chose when approached by showrunner Jess Brownell. It’s a change the show also made in its second season, switching the character of Kate Sheffield to Kate (or Kathani) Sharma, in recognition of actor Simone Ashley’s Indian heritage.
“Even just changing the name means a lot,” Ha says. “I didn’t grow up watching [period dramas] because I never related to the stories. There was never really that kind of representation in those dramas, so I never connected with them.
“It just highlights how important it is to have [different] kinds of people leading the shows and being in the show, so younger generations from multicultural backgrounds can see themselves in those dramas as well.”
Ha does, however, have a theatrical lineage: her grandmother, Son Sook, is a prolific and well-respected actor in South Korea. “When I went to Korea for holidays, I’d see her in whatever theatre production she was in, and that definitely gave me inspiration.”
Ha will be joined in the upcoming season by other new Asian cast members including Chinese-Scottish actor Katie Leung, best known for playing Cho Chang in the Harry Potter series, a character often criticised as a reductive racial caricature.
Like many actors of colour, Ha was very conscious of the limited roles available growing up – especially in Australia – and aspired to be an “international actress”, gravitating towards the United States where she could see more change on screen. She secured a guest spot on US crime drama Reef Break in 2019, and then took the lead as a mulleted teenage rebel in Paramount+ series Halo.
Since then, Ha has also been cast in the upcoming HBO series, Dune: Prophecy, which airs next month. But that doesn’t mean she’s left Australia behind.
Yerin Ha (right) was nominated for a Logie for her performance in 2023 miniseries Bad Behaviour.Credit: Jane Zhang
“I think it’s really important to still do Australian work as well,” she says. “The [local] industry is also very much changing. You can see it in the kinds of actors they cast as leads for Australian TV – even in things like Home and Away – and in writers’ rooms, too … It’s the people in positions of power that create change.”
She gives a specific shoutout to Que Minh Luu, Netflix’s director of content for Australia and New Zealand, whose first commission was the widely celebrated reboot of Heartbreak High. Ha is also set to star in The Survivors, a local drama series for the streaming giant, based on the Jane Harper novel of the same name.
“I get really shy about people watching my work,” Ha says, when asked what Aussie audiences should watch while they wait for #Benophie to come to life. The answer is Bad Behaviour, the series that led to Ha receiving a Logie nod last year.
“I always go in with the mindset that every show will be my last,” she adds.
After this coming year, that seems destined to change.
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