Breaking Baz: ‘Expats’ Star Ji-Young Yoo On Her Career And Being “Happy” To Be Thrown In “Deep End” Shooting With Lulu Wang & Nicole Kidman
07.06.2024 - 21:11
/ deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Ji-young Yoo says she was thrown in at “the deep end of things“ when she shot Prime Video‘s limited series Expats, playing the central figure of Mercy, a character around whom everyone else orbits.
“I was thrown in,” she says laughing. “But it’s really been a whole super swim,” she says of playing Mercy, a Columbia graduate, in the six-part series written and directed by Lulu Wang. Adapted from Janice Y.K Lee’s 2016 bestselling novel Expatriates, the series follows, from disparate points of view, the lives of three women who are part of the international community in Hong Kong, and who are drawn together following a heartbreaking tragedy.
Yoo’s first day on set in Hong Kong, with no prior rehearsal, had her shooting a huge key scene opposite Nicole Kidman, who plays Margaret, a landscape gardener who comes to know Mercy through tumultuous circumstances.
“Very, very intimidating, not because of anything Nicole has ever done. She’s the sweetest and kindest, but she’s still Nicole Kidman,” says Yoo.
“I was freaking out most of the time, not that anyone made me feel like I couldn’t do it. If anything, everyone seemed to share this strong belief that I was going to be totally fine. I think there was a real sense as soon as I got the job that this was the biggest thing I had ever done in my life, and I was either going to go 110 percent or nothing,” she declares.
Yoo reckons that “maybe it was good that we started at one of the most important and pivotal scenes of the show,” noting that usually it would be a “very chill scene where you are walking and talking and sitting and saying ‘Hi,’ but Lulu goes hard, so we started off pretty strong.”
Indeed, that first moment she shot with Kidman, which takes place at