Former Harry Potter star Katie Leung says her stage performance as a North Korean refugee was inspired by the “beautiful minds” of two defectors she met while researching the role.
The actress — who played the young wizard’s love interest Cho Chang in the hit films — is appearing in You For Me For You at the Royal Court as one of two starving sisters whose attempt to flee the secretive state goes dreadfully wrong.
Her character ends up in America after being separated from her sister on the Chinese border.
Leung, 28, said: “I didn’t know much about North Korea before I did the play — like a lot of people I had a preconceived view of it from the media and movies that made fun of it.
“Meeting real defectors gave us a real insight into the story. One of the big things for me is, because it is such a secluded place and people use phrases like ‘brainwashed’, you almost expect these people to be like robots and of course they’re not, and in fact the opposite is true and they have their own beautiful minds.”
The Scottish actress, who starred in a stage version of the bestseller Wild Swans, has also played an illegal immigrant DVD seller and a woman given up by her parents because of China’s one-child policy but says she is not worried about being typecast.
She said all her roles had been “down to my race” to some extent, but added: “I’ve been very lucky because everything I’ve done so far has been very meaningful.”
Leung went back to college to study photography after the Harry Potter films but said her future is in acting, whether on stage or screen.
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She said: “With this play we worked with the writer quite closely, which was beautiful, and I just think there is something about the intimacy of the theatre that is so special. But I don’t know what I’m going to end up doing next and the uncertainty of it is part of the beauty of the job.”
In You For Me For You, by Korean-American playwright Mia Chung, Leung and Wendy Kweh play sisters Junhee and Minhee.
The Standard’s theatre critic Fiona Mountford wrote: “So powerfully do [Leung and Kweh] make us feel their plight that the depiction of limitless food and choice in the West comes to seem faintly repellent... a salutary thought to take into this season of consumerism and excess.”
You For Me For You runs at the Royal Court Upstairs, Sloane Square, until January 9.
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