This ‘Expats’ Star Can’t Believe She’s Actually in It

In “Expats,” the actress Ji-young Yoo, a relative newcomer to Hollywood, shares the screen with Nicole Kidman, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress and producer. Yoo plays Mercy, a Columbia grad and would-be babysitter for the young son of Kidman’s Margaret, a former landscape architect and a mother of three living, none too happily, in Hong Kong. When Mercy loses her charge in a moment of distraction (yes, she was texting), it sends Margaret into — well, just imagine how Nicole Kidman might react if, say, you were texting and you lost her child.

Yoo, 24, and a film student only a few years ago — “I used to watch ‘Moulin Rouge’ with my mom constantly,” she said — finds all of it difficult to believe even now, two years after shooting wrapped on the six-episode miniseries.

“When I watch the scenes with me and Nicole, it still feels like I was Photoshopped in,” she said in an interview last month.

Premiering on Friday, the Amazon series tells the story of three women, all of them expatriates, living in Hong Kong amid the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests. It is Yoo’s first starring role in a series — she is one of three leads, with Kidman and Sarayu Blue (“To All the Boys”) — and also the director Lulu Wang’s first project since her critically acclaimed 2019 sleeper hit “The Farewell.”