In “Expats,” the actress Ji-young Yoo, a relative newcomer to Hollywood, shares the screen with Nicole Kidman, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress and producer. Yoo plays Mercy, a Columbia grad and would-be babysitter for the young son of Kidman’s Margaret, a former landscape architect and a mother of three living, none too happily, in Hong Kong. When Mercy loses her charge in a moment of distraction (yes, she was texting), it sends Margaret into — well, just imagine how Nicole Kidman might react if, say, you were texting and you lost her child.
Yoo, 24, and a film student only a few years ago — “I used to watch ‘Moulin Rouge’ with my mom constantly,” she said — finds all of it difficult to believe even now, two years after shooting wrapped on the six-episode miniseries.
“When I watch the scenes with me and Nicole, it still feels like I was Photoshopped in,” she said in an interview last month.
Premiering on Friday, the Amazon series tells the story of three women, all of them expatriates, living in Hong Kong amid the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests. It is Yoo’s first starring role in a series — she is one of three leads, with Kidman and Sarayu Blue (“To All the Boys”) — and also the director Lulu Wang’s first project since her critically acclaimed 2019 sleeper hit “The Farewell.”
“Lulu was really particular about who she wanted,” Kidman wrote in an email. “The minute we saw Ji-young’s audition, it was just, ‘Well, here she is.’ It was effortless.”
“In many ways, I think Ji-young is Mercy,” Wang said.
“She’s got the wit and the sarcasm of Mercy,” Wang continued. “And she’s got that Mona Lisa smile, where you’re not quite sure if she’s smiling or frowning.”
This year looks to be a breakout for Yoo, with three major projects screening or streaming in the coming months. There’s “Expats,” which is not only Yoo’s first starring role on a TV series, but her first TV series, period, outside of voice work. Also to come is the indie film “Smoking Tigers,” which is currently on the festival circuit after Yoo’s win last year at Tribeca for best performance in a U.S. narrative feature. And then there’s the feature film “Freaky Tales,” with the actress appearing alongside Pedro Pascal and Jay Ellis. Directed by the filmmaking duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (“Captain Marvel”), the drama had its world premiere this month at Sundance.
Last month, Yoo sat in a coffee shop on Hollywood Boulevard near the city’s Thai Town, talking about her life before and since “Expats,” including how the role of Mercy came her way. In person, she’s much more carefree and open than the character she inhabits, with a wide smile — not Mona Lisa-like at all — and a way with a funny anecdote. She’s also quick to acknowledge her recent good fortune; in her account of the past few months, the words “humbled” and “grateful” come up a lot.
“I had a really good year,” she admitted.
Yoo was born and raised in the suburbs of Denver, the daughter of Korean immigrants. “The area was predominantly white, very conservative, very religious, so I just didn’t fit in,” she said. Her parents didn’t speak Korean in the home, so Yoo didn’t learn the language until her junior year of high school.
“I remember ‘Gangnam Style’ came out when I was in middle school, and everyone was asking me to translate the lyrics, and I was like, I don’t know, I don’t speak Korean!” she recalled. “And they would look at me all confused and ask, Why not? Why don’t you?”
Yoo was inspired to pursue acting when, at 13, she landed a role in the play “99 Histories,” by the Korean American playwright and screenwriter Julia Cho (“Turning Red”). “There were people who had lived in L.A. and were now living in Denver who were SAG-AFTRA members, and had real credits under their belt,” she said. “That was a really special experience — to see that there were people who were actually doing this for a living.”
In 2017, Yoo moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California. “Up until then, I’d been really struggling with that divide between being Asian or being American and feeling like I had to be one or the other,” she said. “In Southern California, people are coming from so many different cultures that no one’s really worried about exact percentages of each. They’re just Asian American.”
As a cinema and media studies major at U.S.C., Yoo learned about the history of actors of Asian descent in Hollywood: the unlikely early stars, like the silent-film heartthrob Sessue Hayakawa, and the decades of stereotyping and discrimination. “I think I went into the industry pretty eyes wide open that there was a real possibility that I would lose out on work for no other reason than the fact that I was Asian,” she said.
Even so, the work came: in small parts in dramatic shorts and animated series, followed by ensemble roles in feature films, including Amy Poehler’s 2021 dramedy “Moxie” and the 2022 coming-of-age story “The Sky Is Everywhere.”
When she first auditioned for “Expats,” Yoo was 21, auditioning for the role of a 25-year-old. “I was like, I look way too young for the role, so I put on a ton of makeup and tried to make myself look older,” Yoo said.
For Wang, the effect was unconvincing: “I just said, ‘Hey, I’m so sorry to ask you this if this is something you’re not comfortable with, but I would love for you to do this without any makeup on.’
“Once she took the makeup off, she behaved differently,” Wang continued. “There was a nakedness and a vulnerability that was immediately present.”
After Yoo had secured the role, Wang called her personally with the news. “She said, ‘Hey this is Lulu,’” Yoo recalled. “I was so shocked that I didn’t say anything at first. And there was this little pause, and then she said, ‘Wang.’”
Based on “The Expatriates,” a best-selling novel by the Korean American author Janice Y.K. Lee, the series is sprawling and cinematic, with a strong roster of American and international actors that includes Brian Tee (“Chicago Med”) as Kidman’s husband, the Filipina actress Ruby Ruiz (“Iska”), and the British actor Jack Huston (“Boardwalk Empire”).
“What was amazing about working on a show like this is I never worried about whether or not my scene partners were going to be good,” Yoo said. “I was just worried about whether I was going to be good for my scene partners.”
Kidman never saw any evidence of such nervousness, she said. “She had such a depth to her performance, it was exciting to watch her unfold over the course of the months of shooting.”
Yoo said that working on “Expats,” with its slower, meditative pace, taught her how to modulate her emotions for the screen. “I think I really learned how to trust that the camera was going to pick up everything,” she said.
Others have noticed the progress. So Young Shelly Yo, the director of “Smoking Tigers,” first met Yoo in 2021, when the actress tried out, unsuccessfully, for a role in a short film. But the time Yoo spent working on “Expats” and appearing in the play “Man of God” at Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles was evident when she auditioned for “Smoking Tigers,” Yo said. “She had a weight to her, a glow to her,” she said. “She had grown so much.”
In the past few years, Yoo says, a number of Asian American actors have reached out to her with advice and help. “Tamlyn Tomita and Ron Yuan have really taken me under their wing,” she said. “That was incredibly kind and generous, and something they totally didn’t have to do.”
Despite her recent successes, Yoo continues to see auditions as a way to meet people rather than strictly as a shot at a job. “I’m still introducing myself to people in the industry,” she said.
Perhaps because of that outlook, winning awards and appearing opposite childhood heroes in prestige dramas have not changed Yoo’s immediate goals all that much. “Honestly, my five-year plan had been to stay employed long enough to pay my rent,” she said. “And that’s still pretty much the plan.”
