Who is Katie Leung? Once a victim of racial attacks for romancing Harry Potter, she’s now Lady Araminta Gun in Bridgerton

But as it turned out, she found out a couple of weeks later that she beat 3,000 girls to be selected as Cho Chang in Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. She attributes the edge to the fact that she was the only one from her lot who was from Scotland, a trait the casting agents were looking for in particular.

Katie Leung’s Harry Potter memories

Katie maintains her fondest memory across the four movies she did in the Harry Potter franchise was the first audition since both her parents, divorced at the time, reunited to accompany her for the same. She was just three when her parents divorced. While her mother moved back to Hong Kong, she continued to live with her father, stepmother, and siblings in Scotland.

Katie was also one of the few actors to be sent to China by Warner Bros to promote Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in a rather rare move for Hollywood back then. Her identity as an Asian-Britisher continued to chase her well into the franchise, particularly after she was slammed by Harry Potter hardliners for her romance with Daniel Radcliffe’s titular character.

Racist flak for kissing Harry Potter

“I was Googling myself at one point, and I was on this website, which was kind of dedicated to the Harry Potter fandom. I remember reading all the comments. And, yeah, it was a lot of racist shit,” Katie recalled on the Chinese Chippy Girl podcast in 2021. She also revealed that she was advised by her publicists to deny the existence of such comments if asked in promotional interviews.

The racist flak continued for Leung across the franchise, and peaked after her much-discussed kissing scene with Radcliffe in David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix (2007). Her character Cho Chang went on to appear in Yates’ Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011). Billed as Harry’s first romance, she eventually gets sidelined as he ends up marrying and having kids with his best friend Ron Weasley’s younger sister Ginny Weasley.

Quitting acting and eventual return

Katie’s unfortunate tryst with racist comments prompted her to mull over whether she wants to continue acting or not. “Harry Potter was an amazing experience but I didn’t know whether I was chosen on my acting ability or because I fitted the character at the time,” she told Evening Standard in 2011. However, enrolling herself for a drama course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland reignited that spark for acting.

“I remember coming out of it and thinking, ‘Nothing’s going to beat it,’ because it was so successful. I remember being lost, going, ‘What’s next? People will have these high expectations of me topping it, and it’s never going to happen.’ I think I was so afraid of meeting these expectations that I gave up, or didn’t give myself the chance, after it, to try and continue acting,” she told The Guardian recently.

“I was really hard on myself. I was trying to constantly prove I was more than just the actor from Harry Potter,” she added. Katie then went on to work extensively on stage, in television, and in films. Her most notable work came with the boom of streaming, as she played Ash in Prime Video’s sci-fi show The Peripheral in 2022 and voiced Caitlyn Kiramman in Netflix’s action adventure show Arcane from 2021 till 2024. She’s got a new lease of life now, with her role of Lady Araminta Gun in Shonda Rhimes and Jess Brownell’s Bridgerton season 4.

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“People thought I’d be offended at being asked to play Araminta. And I thought, ‘No – I feel seen, for once!’ I was the ingénue 20 years ago,” she told Harper’s Bazaar recently. For her part of a evil but humanized stepmother, Katie took inspiration from Maggie Cheung’s performance in Wong Kar’wai’s 200o seminal Chinese film In The Mood for Love. “There’s something romantic about the way she floats about. I wanted Araminta to glide,” added Katie.