When the clock struck midnight last Saturday, Yerin Ha was leaving the 19th-century Palais Brongniart in Paris, dressed in a blue satin Prada gown lined with crystals. Some might say she looked straight out of Cinderella, and that would be the point—the Australian actress, 28, had just attended the premiere of Season Four of Bridgerton, the Shonda Rhimes–produced Regency-era series based on Julia Quinn’s romance novels, returning to Netflix next week. Ha plays the new lead, Sophie Baek, a maid and the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, who becomes the mysterious love interest of Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson), the seemingly eternal bachelor and second-oldest Bridgerton son.
Mostly unknown to the world before now, Ha’s identity as an actress began taking shape long ago. “I think in my blood I always wanted to be an entertainer,” she says. It’s no wonder, given her grandparents Son Sook and Kim Seong-Ok were linchpins of the Seoul theater community in the late 20th century, with Sook also winning six Baeksang Arts Awards—think Korean Oscars—in her film-and-TV career. In fact, it was seeing her grandmother in a one-woman show that led Ha to think seriously about acting professionally.
Ha’s mother, however, is the one who made it all happen. “My mom carved out the path for me,” she says. When Ha was 14 and just beginning her drama training in Sydney, her hometown, her mother suggested she move to Korea to both learn the language and pursue acting. For once, Ha could be part of the majority—“not the minority, as in Australia, where [my mom] felt representation for Asian actors was scarce at the time.” Ha enrolled at Seoul’s Kaywon High School of Arts, staying for three years and studying with more rigor and discipline than ever before.
By the time she returned to Australia, she was ready for Sydney’s prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art, where she graduated from in 2018. A year later, she landed her first major role, alongside Jane Eyre’s Mia Wasikowska in the gender-bending Sydney Theatre Company production of Lord of the Flies, directed by Kit Williams (best known for his one-woman adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, starring Sarah Snook).
Though she quickly moved into screen work, appearing in Australian productions including Bad Behaviour and The Survivors, Ha returned to the stage last fall. Joining Williams once again, she played Madame in his production of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the Donmar Warehouse, in London. “It was one of my dreams,” Ha says about working with Williams a second time.
Another dreamlike experience? Landing her part in Bridgerton. “They were auditioning for a few months before I had even gotten my first audition,” she says about the casting process, which took place in the summer of 2024. “I was at a supermarket with my mom, [visiting family] in the countryside in Korea, and my agent called and said I needed to do another tape, and I needed to do it within 24 hours.”
She rushed back home and thought to herself: “F—! I don’t have a British accent under my belt.” Clearly, no one held it against her, as she had a callback with the casting directors a few days later, and did a chemistry read with Thompson over Zoom a few days after that. “I had to do it at 11 P.M. my time, so I was running on pure nerves for an entire day,” she says. “I just tried not to force it or give smize-y looks. I tried to be as open and honest as possible, and I guess it worked.”
“It was the quickest turnaround I’ve ever had,” she says of what followed after hearing she’d booked the job. She left Korea, packed up her room in Sydney, and moved to London. “They say that your life can change in a day, and mine did.”
Ha felt tremendous pressure when entering the mind-bendingly long shoot—one month of prep (fittings, rehearsals, dance lessons) followed by nine months of filming. Aware that Sophie was a beloved character in Quinn’s original series, she didn’t want to let any longtime fans down. She was also hyper-aware of being the first East Asian lead on the show. “There was a lot of responsibility on my shoulders,” she says. “[But it] just made me want to prepare as much as I could to be able to give it my all. And once we were shooting, I just had to let that stress go—it’s stressful enough leading a show.”
It’s hard to resist comparing Ha’s own trajectory to that of a modern-day Cinderella: from a phone call in rural Korea to a Parisian palace. But instead of a prince, she’d like her next chapter to be a grittier drama film. “I’ve done sci-fi, I’ve done romance, and I would just like to do an independent drama,” she says. In any case, Yerin Ha’s future has “happily ever after” written all over it.
Bridgerton’s fourth season will premiere on Netflix on January 29 with four new episodes. The next four episodes will be released on February 26
Victoria Herman is a New York–based writer
