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Dubai: When the audition for KPop Demon Hunters landed, Arden Cho had already walked away from acting. She had told her representatives she was done. She had spent close to two years travelling instead of working. And when the offer came through, her first response was to remind everybody of that.
“I reminded my team, I’m like, I quit. I’m not doing this anymore,” she told fans at Middle East Film and Comic Con (MEFCC) 2026, speaking on the Main Stage at ADNEC Centre Abu Dhabi.
She took the audition anyway. The film became the most-watched title in Netflix’s history, with more than 500 million views, and put four songs in the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 at once. A sequel was confirmed in March, with directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans returning.
Walking away
What she had walked away from was Partner Track, the Netflix legal drama in which she played Ingrid Yun, and the first show she had ever carried. Her face was on billboards across Hollywood for months.
“It was one of those pinch-me moments, that this is real,” she said. Then it was cancelled after one season.
“I said, you know what? This is my moment. This is my show. And if it gets cancelled, now what?” she said. “At that point I was like, I’ve been doing this for 18 plus years, and I don’t know what else to hope for or what else to go after. And I quit.”
What followed was the first stretch of her adult life not organised around work: close to two years of travelling and bucket-list trips.
“I feel like I grew up trying to be the perfect model minority daughter. All I did was work, work, work, work, work, and take care of my family, take care of everyone who needed me,” she said. “I have never travelled in my life for myself. I have only travelled for work.”
Ten lines on a voice note
The pitch that pulled her back was almost incidental. Her team mentioned the director, Maggie Kang, and Cho clocked the name immediately as Korean. Then they mentioned the title.
“I like K-pop. I like some demon hunting,” she said. She also told herself it did not really count. “This seems fun, and it’s voiceover. It’s not the same thing. I’m still quitting, but I’ll audition for this.”
She was in Korea at the time. The audition was a voice note recorded on her phone, around 10 lines long. Then nothing for weeks, until a call came asking her to read for Rumi at Sony.
“And I was like, what’s Rumi?” she said. When it clicked that Rumi was the lead, the calculation changed. “Who wouldn’t want to read the lead?”
The session where she knew
Her sense that the film might land came around her fourth recording session, when HUNTR/X meet the Saja Boys for the first time.
“When they bust out Soda Pop, I was like, this is going to be the craziest thing of all time,” she said. “I was like, oh my gosh, they’re so hot. How could people not love this?”
She learned much later that this had been deliberate. “For weeks and months, Maggie was like, make them hotter. More abs, more sexy.”
Confidence was not the same as prediction, though. “Did I think that every human would love this movie? No. I don’t think anyone could have predicted that.”
Why it travelled
When asked why the film travelled so far beyond its expected audience, Cho pointed to something close to universal.
“Regardless of your gender, or your age, or your culture, everyone wants to be seen, wants to be loved for who they are, and wants to feel safe to be who they truly are.”
Most people, she said, have somebody pulling in the opposite direction. “I don’t think Celine is a villain. I think Celine was trying to protect [Rumi] in the way that she knew how.”
“Everyone has a mum or a dad or an auntie or a grandpa who tells you to be one way, because in their mind, this is the only way to be safe,” she added. “At the end of the day, that choice belongs to you.”
Pyjamas, no make-up, and a sound booth
The emotional scenes with Celine turned out to be the easy ones, because Cho recognised them.
“I knew what those words felt like, saying that to Celine, because I said that in some way or form in my life,” she said. “I feel like every Asian knows this, but you’re just never quite good enough for your mum. You’re never smart enough, pretty enough, perfect enough.”
Playing Rumi the stadium-filling star was harder. “It’s hard to feel like the leader of HUNTR/X when you’re in a sound booth in pyjamas with no make-up on.”
The cast recorded entirely apart, and never rehearsed together, even over Zoom. “We all met for the first time essentially at the premiere.”
On why she does not sing the songs herself, her answer was flat. “Obviously, because I’m not a K-pop singer, and EJAE has a golden voice.”
The power of no
Asked how she chooses what to take on, Cho said the answer took years to reach.
“When I was younger, I felt pressured to say yes, to please whoever was asking,” she said. “In the last 10 years of my life, the most powerful tool I’ve learned is saying no.”
That runs against standard advice for actors, and she knows it. “A lot of actors will say you just have to say yes to every audition. But I disagree. If you say yes to everything, you sort of give a little to everything and you’re not really great at anything.”
The roles she turned down, she said, are what made room for the ones she got.
