LOS ANGELES – In Expats, American actress Ji-young Yoo, a relative newcomer to Hollywood, shares the screen with Nicole Kidman, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning Australian actress-producer.

Yoo plays Mercy, a Columbia University graduate and would-be babysitter for the young son of Kidman’s Margaret, a former landscape architect and mother of three living, none too happily, in Hong Kong.

When Mercy loses her charge in a moment of distraction, it sends Margaret into – well, just imagine how Kidman might react if, say, you were texting and lost her child.

Yoo, 24, and a film student only a few years ago – “I used to watch Moulin Rouge (2001) with my mum constantly,” she said – finds all of it difficult to believe even now, two years after shooting wrapped on the six-episode miniseries that is available on Prime Video.

“When I watch the scenes with me and Nicole, it still feels like I was Photoshopped in,” Yoo said in an interview in December 2023.

The 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, 2020 to 2021). It is also China-born American director Lulu Wang’s first project since her critically acclaimed 2019 sleeper hit The Farewell.

“Lulu was really particular about who she wanted,” Kidman, 56, wrote in an e-mail. “The minute we saw Ji-young’s audition, it was just, ‘Well, here she is.’ It was effortless.”

Wang, 40, said: “In many ways, I think Ji-young is Mercy. She’s got the wit and sarcasm of Mercy. And she’s got that Mona Lisa smile, where you’re not quite sure if she’s smiling or frowning.”

2024 looks to be a breakout year for Yoo, with three major projects screening or streaming in the coming months.

There is Expats, which is not only her first starring role in a TV series, but also her first TV series – outside of voice work.

Also to come is the indie film Smoking Tigers, which is on the festival circuit after Yoo’s win in 2023 at the Tribeca Film Festival for best performance in a US narrative feature.

Then, there is the feature film Freaky Tales, with Yoo appearing alongside Pedro Pascal and Jay Ellis. Directed by film-making duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Captain Marvel, 2019), the drama had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier in January.

Yoo is quick to acknowledge her recent good fortune. In her account of the past few months, the words “humbled” and “grateful” come up a lot.

She was born and raised in the suburbs of Denver, the daughter of Korean immigrants. “The area was predominantly white, very conservative, very religious, so I just didn’t fit in,” she said.

Her parents did not speak Korean at home, so Yoo did not learn the language until her junior year of high school.

In 2017, she moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California (USC).

“Up until then, I’d been struggling with that divide between being Asian or being American and feeling like I had to be one or the other,” she said. “In Southern California, people are coming from so many different cultures that no one’s worried about exact percentages of each. They’re just Asian American.”

As a cinema and media studies major at USC, Yoo learnt about the history of actors of Asian descent in Hollywood: the unlikely early stars, including Japanese silent film heart-throb Sessue Hayakawa, and the decades of stereotyping and discrimination.

“I think I went into the industry pretty eyes wide open that there was a real possibility that I would lose out on work for no other reason than the fact that I was Asian,” she said.

Even so, the work came: in small parts in dramatic shorts and animated series, followed by ensemble roles in feature films, including Amy Poehler’s 2021 dramedy Moxie and the 2022 coming-of-age story The Sky Is Everywhere.

Expats – based on The Expatriates, a best-selling novel by Korean-American author Janice Y.K. Lee – is sprawling and cinematic, with a strong roster of American and international actors that includes Brian Tee as Kidman’s husband, Filipina actress Ruby Ruiz and British actor Jack Huston.

“What was amazing about working on a show like this is I never worried about whether my scene partners were going to be good,” Yoo said. “I was just worried about whether I was going to be good for my scene partners.”

Kidman never saw any evidence of such nervousness, she said. “She had such a depth to her performance, it was exciting to watch her unfold over the course of the months of shooting.”

Despite her recent successes, Yoo continues to see auditions as a way to meet people rather than strictly as a shot at a job. “I’m still introducing myself to people in the industry,” she said.

Perhaps because of that outlook, winning awards and appearing opposite childhood heroes in prestige dramas have not changed Yoo’s immediate goals all that much.

“Honestly, my five-year plan had been to stay employed long enough to pay my rent,” she said. “And that’s still pretty much the plan.” NYTIMES

• Expats is available on Prime Video.