Harry Potter actress Katie Leung: I regularly experience racism

Katie Leung is staging a small screen comeback with BBC2's One Child 
Katie Leung is staging a small screen comeback with BBC2's One Child  Credit: Heathcliffe O'Malley

When Katie Leung gets into a taxi, drivers sometimes tell her: “Wow, you speak very good English.” It’s hardly a compliment to someone who was born in Dundee and attended private school in Lanarkshire, but it’s the type of response she regularly encounters. So why the assumption this thoroughly British 28-year-old won’t speak very much English?

That would be her mixed heritage: her father, Peter, runs a wholesale company in Glasgow, while her mother, Kar Wai Li, is a successful Hong Kong financier. The two divorced when Leung was three. Cue all sorts of “casual racism” levelled at her from various quarters. “It really irks me,” she admits. “It is just ignorance. It is something that needs to be addressed.”

Installing more English-speaking Asian actresses on our screens would be a good start, she suggests. Leung is playing her part, but in her view it’s not enough.

Leung plays Mei in BBC2's thriller One Child 
Leung plays Mei in BBC2's thriller One Child  Credit: Ed Miller/BBC Pictures

Famed for beating 3,000 girls to the role of Harry Potter’s girlfriend Cho Chang in the film franchise of JK Rowling’s children’s books, she is yet to play an Amanda or a Rachel in anything.

Her next acting role, in the new BBC Two thriller One Child, sees her play someone called Mei, a Chinese-born girl given up for adoption to Anglo-American parents because of China’s controversial one-child policy. 

Elsewhere, actress Gemma Chan is leading the charge with recent roles in Channel 4’s Humans and in a 50th anniversary production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming at Trafalgar Studios in London. Yet her parts are but drops in the ocean, with only near-reaching ripples.

"I went into Harry Potter thinking this would be it. This would be my career. It wasn’t until I came to the end of filming that I realised it might have just been a case of luck that I got the role. No more."
Katie Leung

“You say diversity, but it is not ‘diversity’ – it is [about] a more truthful representation on our screens, so people see a Chinese person speaking English and won’t come to the assumption that people of colour don’t speak English,” says Leung when we meet at a London hotel. The casting landscape is improving, she believes, but she worries not enough young Asian girls are considering the acting profession for fear they will be typecast in peripheral, Chinese-centric roles.

Her own career break was unusual. She had no previous acting experience when her father spotted Cho Chang’s role advertised and took her to an open casting. “I went into Harry Potter thinking this would be it. This would be my career,” she says. “It wasn’t until I came to the end of filming that I realised it might have just been a case of luck that I got the role. No more.”

"I tried to shut it out of my mind," Leung says of negative comments
"I tried to shut it out of my mind," Leung says of negative comments

The mass attention of Harry Potter fandom came as a hideous shock in 2005 after her first performance in the Goblet of Fire, and her part in the films saw her subjected to ‘I Hate Katie’ websites set up by maladjusted Potter fans, jealous of her on-screen kiss with the actor Daniel Radcliffe, who played the boy wizard. There were also racist online messages.

“I was quite impressed by how well I coped with it,” she says. “I think it was all to do with being in denial. I tried to shut it out of my mind.”

The fallout contributed to Leung’s quick (though temporary) exit from acting. Feeling a fraud, she threw herself into a photography course at Edinburgh College of Art, and that might well have been that. But the bug never really left her, and shortly before graduating in 2011, she won a part in Wild Swans at The Young Vic, the first stage adaptation of the Jung Chang best-seller.

After winning plaudits for this, she enrolled in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to hone her skills with a three-year acting course, in the midst of which she was cast in Channel 4’s mini-series Run. The role landed her a Breakthrough Brit award at the Baftas in 2014. Despite her best efforts, success seems to hang on to her coattails. 

That kiss: Leung kisses Daniel Radcliffe for Harry Potter
That kiss: Leung kisses Daniel Radcliffe for Harry Potter
"I was just a goodie two shoes. I’m not even proud of it. I wish I was more rebellious."

It’s a success she wears lightly. Softly spoken, and a self-confessed introvert, she’s often happiest drinking wine, watching films and playing video games from the comfortable confines of her sofa in Glasgow, alongside her boyfriend Eric. At school, she says, she was a “teacher’s pet.”

“I was just a goodie two shoes. I’m not even proud of it. I wish I was more rebellious,” she says. “My brother was the more charismatic and outgoing one.”

But her self-effacing manner belies her steely views, not least on the one-child policy (set to end in China in March this year, after 35 years) at the centre of her forthcoming drama.

The seat-clutcher sees her character return to her birthplace, Guangzhou, to meet her biological mother, who has asked her to return to help save her son, and Mei’s brother’s, life.

He is facing execution on death row for something he didn’t do. Down the rabbit hole she goes, becoming embroiled in a complex matrix of questions of family and identity. 

If it sounds dark, filming was a much jollier affair. At one point, Leung’s grandmother, who lives in Scotland, was brought on to the set to hand out mangos and lychees – “in the middle of a scene” – to cast and crew.

Leung’s views on the topic at stake are uncompromising: she describes having multiple children as “a basic human right” and points out there’ll be 30 million more men than women in China by 2020. 

“It’s crazy. There is this thing called ‘courtship motivated emigration’. If men in China can’t find their other half in China, they are going to go somewhere else,” she says.

The cast of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando
The cast of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando Credit: Getty Images

Her Twitter feed is alive with posts on issues of race and diversity in TV and as a flag-bearer for fairer casting, she is understandably excited by Swaziland-born Noma Dumezweni’s role as Hermione in the forthcoming stage adaptation of the Harry Potter saga.

“It is wonderful,” she says. “So exciting. You do find out when you are on social media that the majority of people are incredibly supportive. There are just one or two who…. yeah.” She tails off. I think she means to finish the sentence with “tear you to pieces” but she is too discrete.

I wonder, how this beautiful yet shy young woman felt about being named Scotland’s Most Stylish Female in 2007? Mentioning the award is like dropping a bomb. She hides behind her hands as if in mortal embarrassment. Perhaps I should never have raised it? Fortunately, however, she is laughing.

“I enjoyed it for a small amount of time but looking back now I am ashamed,” she says. “I prefer to stay in and watch Netflix. I am such an old lady”.

• One Child is on BBC Two at 9pm on Wednesday 17 February