Arden Cho is the last person you’d expect to have spent her childhood wanting to disappear, given that she’s now the star of one of the biggest Netflix hits of all time.
But the K-Pop Demon Hunters actress says she grew up wishing for blue eyes and blonde hair.
‘I hated that I looked Asian,’ she says bluntly. Raised in Texas as the eldest daughter of Korean immigrants, Cho spent her early years feeling like the wrong answer to the question of what American beauty was supposed to be.
Speaking on the BBC World Service’s Global Women series, she explained that she felt American but was constantly treated as though she didn’t belong.
So when Cho first read the script for K-Pop Demon Hunters, the animated Netflix smash about a girl band saving the world, something clicked.
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Her character Rumi mirrored the push-and-pull she’d lived with for decades.
She admits she spent parts of her life wanting to be anyone other than Arden: ‘I can honestly say that at different points in my life, I hated a lot of myself and I wanted to be someone else.
‘As kids, what you see shapes who you become and I feel like I just didn’t see enough people that look like me.’
The film’s runaway success – 33 million views in two weeks and Top 10 in 93 countries – has turned Cho into the kind of role model she never had.
Suddenly, Korean-American kids have someone who looks like them at the center of their favourite media, and the actress says families have told her the film makes them proud of who they are.
Cho credits the wider Korean cultural wave for shifting perceptions. K-beauty and K-pop, she says, have helped push Korean identity into the global spotlight.
That pride didn’t come easily. She explains that projects led by Asian casts are still too often treated like a financial gamble: ‘I feel like it kind of sucks to say this, but any time there’s an Asian-led project, people feel like it’s a risk.’
As a kid, Cho chalked prejudice up to ignorance – people simply didn’t know what it meant to be Korean or Asian. As an adult, she’s less forgiving.
With rising immigration raids and political scapegoating, she says it’s ‘heartbreaking and disappointing,’ especially as immigrants ‘made America what it is.’
Korean news outlets estimate that up to 150,000 undocumented Korean immigrants, including adoptees, could face deportation. For Cho, that lands close to home.
Maybe that’s why the film has hit such a nerve. Cho thinks viewers were desperate for something unifying, and a neon-soaked, demon-fighting K-pop adventure delivered exactly that.
With seven soundtrack tracks charting on the Billboard Hot 100 and fan art flooding social media, the calls for a sequel are relentless. Cho’s heard ‘wonderful things,’ but admits the decision lies with Netflix and Sony. She jokes that ‘the world would riot’ if it doesn’t happen.
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