As Bridgerton season four gets underway, one name among the new additions to the cast stands out: Katie Leung. Anyone over the age of 10 has probably seen her before. She played Cho Chang in the Harry Potter films. (Starting in the fourth, all the way through the eighth; if you somehow missed it, Cho, a Ravenclaw, is Harry’s sweet but overly emotional crush before he gets with Ginny, and she fights for the good guys through the end of the series.)
To be clear, Leung is a versatile actor who has appeared in a wide variety of projects throughout her successful career, but to millennials, the HP films are foundational, and I’m personally really happy to see Leung in a big, high-budget, high-profile franchise again.
Katie Leung has spoken about how a subset of racist Harry Potter fans protested her casting online (Leung is of Chinese heritage and grew up in Scotland), and how she was coached to ignore and downplay their attacks. Now, cast as Lady Araminta Gun, she steps into another role from a highly popular book series with a rabid fan base—though one hopes that, by now, Bridgerton fans have gotten used to the racially diverse casting choices the series makes. Then again, there’s always someone upset about something.
