Bridgerton’s breakout star Yerin Ha and her unlikely path from Sydney to stardom
What’s it like to be part of the biggest show on television? Sydney actor Yerin Ha says her life has changed forever since she was cast in the Netflix juggernaut: ‘I’m trusting God has a plan for me’.
Yerin Ha can feel an existential crisis coming on. “It happens with every show,” the actor admits. “I get such bad post-show blues and then I just start to ponder, like, ‘Wow. What is life? What is art? Who am I?’” The first two questions I’ll leave her to mull over – if she finds the answers, I’d love to hear them – but for the last, I can be of assistance. Yerin Ha, 27, is an Australian actor, who, after a scrupulous search through every drama school, theatre troupe and local television production around the world, is about to be the star of the fourth season of Bridgerton, Netflix’s frothy and addictive, distinctively un-costumed drama, watched by hundreds of millions of people.
“I was just saying to some of the cast members today,” Ha begins, “I’m actually starting to get a bit sad and emotional because it has been such a long marathon.” Almost nine months of “shooting, shooting, shooting”, Ha jokes, since production began on the Netflix series in October last year. She was on set in London this morning, and though we speak late into the night, with Ha snuggled into a charcoal hoodie in the corner of her bedroom, her jet hair framing some of the best cheekbones on television, she will be back again tomorrow at 6.30am sharp. (“Pretty good,” Ha says happily, without a trace of sarcasm; one wonders what an early call time in Bridgerton-land looks like.) “The show kind of becomes you, and you become the character. I really start to care for [my character] Sophie, and Luke,” admits Ha, referring to her scene partner Luke Thompson, who has played the bed-hopping, threesome-having, soulful painter Benedict Bridgerton since the show first premiered and will be elevated to the rank of bona fide leading man in season four. “Thinking about parting ways and the show finishing is making me a bit sad.”
But there is much to take her mind off it: in June, Ha stars in Netflix’s The Survivors, based on a Jane Harper thriller about a small town in Tasmania rocked by a murder with echoes to a past tragedy. The series is the biggest production to film in the state and was made over almost four months last year. After it wrapped, Ha booked Bridgerton and returned to Sydney to pack her entire life into storage before jetting to London and straight into this ravishing pastel fantasy land. When Bridgerton finally finishes filming, she’ll come back to Sydney to find a new home in the city. “It’ll be a lot of life admin, boring and stressful stuff, but it has to be done,” she says with a shrug. Beyond that, a free dance card, though probably not for long. Like many Australian actors, a global career unfolds gradually then all at once. “I think Yerin is a superstar, and I hope she’s not lost to Australia,” says Tony Ayres, creator of The Survivors.
Ha has worked overseas before, on sprawling sci-fi adaptations including Halo (the TV iteration of the phenomenally popular video game) and last year’s Dune: Prophecy. Halo, which filmed in 2019, was made only a year after Ha graduated from Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), and she has a tendency to compare that experience to this one: both huge TV shows with big, serious sets full of people telling her that her days of plausible anonymity were over. On Bridgerton, Ha has noticed a shift that comes with maturity. “I’ve learnt this sense of knowing how to be OK with being by myself,” she explains. “I definitely think that this show has taught me a lot about my independence. I feel like I’ve grown as a human being, and as an actor. In my younger years I really sought validation and felt like I needed to prove myself. But I think I’m doing a bit less of that now, which is empowering.”
It’s apt, given the subject matter of season four of Bridgerton, which follows Sophie Baek, a Korean housemaid who Cinderellas her way into Benedict’s arms. (And - this will be meaningful for the Bridgerton book readers of The Australian Weekend Magazine - his cottage’s master bedroom and also its lake, intimate scenes of the kind of intensity now synonymous with the series). As she traverses an unpractised path across strict class stratas, Sophie learns to both love herself and, crucially, believe herself worthy of love. This also happens to be the driving force for Mia, Ha’s character in The Survivors, who returns to Evelyn Bay, the small town that never quite accepted her, having finally found love with Kieran (Charlie Vickers), still grieving his brother’s tragic death years before. “Maybe I’m a method actor,” Ha laughs. “Maybe I’ve learned things through Sophie. Maybe I’m really living through her.”
In conversation, Ha’s manner is wry but reserved. She has crippling imposter syndrome. “Sometimes, even when I’m on this show, I have moments being like, ‘How am I here?’ Like, ‘I did a terrible job today.’ I just think that will never leave me, to be honest,” she admits. “I think because I’m constantly reaching to be better and striving for greatness, I don’t think there’ll ever be a day where I’m like, ‘Yeah, I did great today.’” She’s starting to wonder if maybe this is the secret. That it can suit an actor to always feel like an imposter, that there is endless depth to be mined from the sensation of never being enough. “Maybe that mentality is the thing that’s got me here, in a way,” Ha muses, serious for a second, before turning to laugh at herself. “Like, a really strange way.”
There is a moment in The Survivors when Mia is so fed up with the way everyone in Evelyn Bay treats her – from her mother-in-law to her husband’s friends and even, at times, her husband – that she explodes. Until this point, Mia is something of a saint: she understands the fraught nature of returning to the site of a tragedy in her husband’s family, while also cocooning her baby daughter from the worst of this emotional swampland. But in episode four, when another dead body turns up on the beach, echoing unsolved deaths from Mia and Kieran’s youth, the simmering tension snaps in a way that is deeply satisfying. “I haven’t forgotten that a girl’s been murdered,” Mia says, almost at a whisper but with the sting of a slap.
“It’s one of my favourite scenes in the entire show,” grins Ayres. “Both me and Yerin, we are very aware of the role of parents in Asian cultures. Basically, you do not speak to your parents like that… For her to make that stand in that moment takes a lot of courage. I love the fact she doesn’t back off. She’s not apologetic.” What does it say about Ha as a performer? “She’s fierce,” Ayres sums up. “The common quality in all of Yerin’s roles is that there is an inner strength.”
“That’s why I started acting, there were lots of parts of me that I was scared to access,” Ha admits. “So through my own experiences of not being able to do that, and playing a character where they have those outburst moments when they do stand their ground, it is quite emotionally cathartic… It feels good, because I don’t do that in my personal life. It’s kind of freeing.”
As a child, Ha was a blend of shyness and playing-to-the-back-of-the-room dramatics. Her grandmother, Son Sook, is a grande dame of the Korean stage and on school holidays Ha would travel to Seoul with her mum to watch her tread the boards. Once, when her grandmother was performing a one-woman play, Ha remembers hearing sniffles in the audience; the play culminated in a standing ovation. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is something that I think I want to do for a very, very long time,’” Ha recalls. (Her grandmother, responding to the Bridgerton news, has said: “Now she is filming in London. Looks like she’s a better actress than me.”)
Ha grew up in Turramurra on Sydney’s upper north shore. “Suburbs,” she laughs, “with kookaburras and blue tongue lizards and lorikeets.” Her mum, sensing the seeds of her passion for the arts, suggested auditioning for a performing arts school in Korea, partially because, in the ’00s when Ha was a teenager, Australia’s screen landscape offered scant opportunities for actors of diverse backgrounds. Our long-running soap operas, launchpads for the careers of Margot Robbie and Chris Hemsworth, did not feature many non-white stars. “I didn’t think there were going to be opportunities for me in Australia,” says Ha. “I didn’t see people like me in Home & Away and Neighbours.” But this has “slowly begun to change”, Ha adds, pointing to her role in The Survivors.
She remembers watching Anne Hathaway in Les Misérables before auditioning for the school in Korea and thinking, “Yes, I dream a dream! And I wanna be an actor!” Ha rolls her eyes. “I’m so dramatic.” She arrived in Seoul as a “pretty optimistic” and maybe even “a bit naive” 15-year-old, with only conversational Korean. Her overwhelming memory of that first day is fear. “My mum dropped me off and I could not move. I could not go into the school because I was so scared.”
She might have stayed in Korea and become, she jokes, “a nepo baby”, but time spent in this other homeland revealed its own set of complexities. “English being my first language, I obviously find it easier to act in the English language,” Ha begins. She also found the beauty standards in Korea to be a crippling pressure. “Korean dramas, you have to be taller and skinnier,” says Ha. “I’m just your average gal, you know? I was starting to doubt myself and how I look and how I feel in my body.” Still, she is grateful for her time spent at school in Seoul. “I definitely feel like I got my work ethic from Korea,” Ha says. But in 2015, sensing opportunities back in Australia, she auditioned for NIDA. Ha was so certain she wouldn’t be accepted that she bought a return ticket from Korea. “I got in on my first try,” she says, quietly proud. Straight after graduation in 2019, she was cast in Kip Williams’ acclaimed Sydney Theatre Company production of Lord of the Flies alongside Mia Wasikowska, but she wasn’t long for the stage. That same year she booked Halo, swapping Sydney theatres for blue screens in Budapest. She was 21 years old.
Ayres first saw Ha in Halo and, later, her Logie-nominated performance in the 2023 Stan miniseries Bad Behaviour, about insidious bullying at an all-girls private school; Ha plays one of the victims, a brilliant scholarship student, and her performance unfurls devastatingly, like a landslide in slow motion. In both these projects and in The Survivors, as a woman holding her new family together by a thread, Ha transforms, shape-shifting to fit the mould of each role with the adaptability of a person who, aged 15, was so determined to succeed that she moved countries in pursuit of her dream. “There are actors who basically always play a version of themselves,” notes Ayres. “Yerin is more of a chameleon.” In post-production on The Survivors, he often found himself drawn to her reactions in the background of a scene, which telegraphed Mia’s inner resolve. “In every take, in every moment, we always knew that if we needed to, we can just go to Yerin. We can cut to her here,” he smiles. “If we’re in trouble with a performance, let’s go to Yerin.”
The Survivors is set against a Tasmanian vista so windswept and salty you can practically taste it. Both Ha and her co-star Charlie Vickers say the landscape is like another character in the show; if that is true, then so is trauma. This is a story about how misery can metastasise, but also about how Mia offers Kieran – wounded and adrift on an ocean of grief – a harbour. “Two very vulnerable people who I think still haven’t really processed their grief and are still going through it,” Ha sums up. “When you’re able to talk about that with someone, I think you get a really sensitive and beautiful side that not everyone gets to see.”
The pair met at the first read-through for the show. “We didn’t need a chemistry read, clearly,” Vickers says cheerfully, calling from the back of a car whisking him to the set of the next season of Rings of Power in London, which is in production just one soundstage over from where Ha is making Bridgerton. “Turn left and you go to Rings of Power, turn right and you go to Bridgerton,” Vickers says with a laugh. “I thought I could see the Bridgerton set out of a window the other day.” Since making The Survivors, the pair have become close. “Yerin is a friend, and a friend that I’ll probably have for life,” he shares. “I think that’s testament to how awesome it was to work with her.”
You can tell, says Vickers, when a scene partner is going to bring their all to a project. “I remember seeing Yerin with an incredibly detailed notebook,” he recalls; it was filled with reams of information about Mia’s life, most of which never made it to screen but helped to colour in the performance. “It’s things like that that just make you feel really good as another actor,” he continues, “because you feel like you’re working with someone who is incredibly considered and thorough in their approach.” Ha is precise, prepared and dedicated, he says. “And she won’t mind me saying this – maybe she will – but she has incredibly high standards of herself and of everyone else, and that raises the game of everyone else. She has this, I guess, drive to be really good. And she is really good.”
Ha ponders where this drive comes from. “To be honest, I think it stems from love around me – feeling like I have to make this work because so much love has been poured into me trying, and ‘I’ll support you as much as you can so you can make this work,’” she reflects. Her ambition is of the quiet, unshowy variety, a recognition of talent that is taken seriously but worn lightly. Perhaps this mentality also comes from a higher place. “I’m really in this phase of trying to restore my faith, trusting that God has a plan for me, and if things don’t work out this way, then that’s fine,” Ha shares. “I’m really trying to let go if a rejection happens; maybe it’s because something else is happening. That actually happened with Bridgerton… There was a rejection that happened, and had I done that job I probably wouldn’t have been able to get the role in Bridgerton. Everything works out for a reason.”
Ha was on holiday in Korea with her mum when she first auditioned and, two weeks later, was offered the role. “We saw a lot of people,” Bridgerton’s showrunner Jess Brownell told me at a recent fan event in London to celebrate the forthcoming season. (Wonderfully timed, for this featherlight romance, on Valentine’s Day.) “The perfect person for Bridgerton, they have to be strong, and smart, and have a rich inner world. And these are very young characters – but as actors they have to be incredibly experienced and know what they’re doing and be in control of their craft. Yerin is all of those things. She just jumped out of her tape when we saw her, she’s fantastic. Right away, we knew that she was our girl.”
Ha and her leading man Thompson met for the first time at Brownell’s London apartment. “They’re both quite sensitive people,” she told me, “meaning not that they’re necessarily soft, but that they really understand what other people need and they’re both paying attention to what is going on around them. The way that they each were like, ‘Hi, are you OK?’ ‘Are you OK?’ There’s a level of care that I knew would translate really well onto the screen.”
Chemistry is paramount in the world of Bridgerton. Speaking on the red carpet at the event, Ha told a reporter: “I hope we do it justice enough and that it translates on the screen, but also I hope fans are happy with the chemistry that Luke and I have as Sophie and Benedict. Or Benophie.” (Couple portmanteaus are a Bridgerton rite of passage. See: Kanthony in season two and Polin in season three.)
There are still a few weeks left of production, and beyond that, a premiere at some point in the future. Ha’s fear, she says, is that her life is going to change very soon. “There was a previous job where people were like, ‘Everyone’s going to notice you on the streets,’” she says. “By the way, those expectations weren’t something I put on myself at all, and it didn’t happen. And I was like, ‘Great. I love being able to go get my groceries and stuff like that.’”
Bridgerton is different, though. The first season was Netflix’s most popular show at the time of its launch in 2020; four years later, fans inhaled 2.3 billion minutes of season three in its first week of release. Jonathan Bailey, who stars as the handsome, vulpine viscount, put it this way to Variety: “The Netflix effect is a very specific phenomenon, which is actually personally quite destabilising.” Ha pauses. “I’m so scared that’s going to happen to me and I almost don’t want it to,” she says, hesitantly. “But if it does, I will reach out to some of the other cast members and go, ‘How did you deal with all of this?’”
At the fan event in London, I watched Ha in a sort of daze, staring out at a room full of Bridgerton obsessives breathlessly assembled in the gilded Raffles ballroom; she was dressed in a bejewelled tea dress by Chinese label Shushu/Tong. This was her first real taste of the series’ intense fandom – a magical, dreamlike experience that was also disorienting. In the Q&A, she described Sophie’s relationship with her evil stepmother Araminta, played by Katie Leung, as akin to getting an MRI. “It’s suffocating and claustrophobic but you have to do it.”
Her second taste happened only the day before we speak. She was walking home to her London flat, no makeup, no glossy big-screen sheen. “Completely my normal self,” Ha says. “I saw these two girls and they turned around and they’re like, ‘Is that…?’” She performs the familiar half-turn, the subtle look up and down. “They came running up to me and they were like, ‘Are you Yerin?’” Ha’s face is lit with a smile as she says this, her voice warm with genuine pleasure. “It was really sweet and they were such lovely girls and they asked me for a picture. I was like, ‘Oh wow.’ This is what people are telling me, like, ‘Be warned, this might happen to you.’ I never believed it, and I still don’t believe it. But now I’m like, ‘Oh. Maybe what they’re saying is real.’”
The Survivors streams on Netflix from June 6
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