Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, The Undoing – it's always an event when Nicole Kidman hits the small screen. Her new Prime Video TV series Expats promises to be just as thrilling.
Based on the bestselling book The Expatriates by Janice Y.K. Lee and directed by Lulu Wang, the show examines the intertwined lives of three women in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy. Glossy and stylish, it’s set to be one of the streamer’s big 2024 releases, but who’s in the cast, and who do they play? We break it down.
Nicole Kidman as Margaret
Hollywood star Kidman will be playing Margaret, an expat living in Hong Kong who suffers a huge tragedy when her infant son vanishes. “Sometimes I want to be alone where I’m not somebody’s wife, not somebody’s mother, where I’m not defined by tragedy,” she says in the trailer, alongside clips showing her walking alongside her children.
“You’re just watching them every second, even when your eyes are closed… I have no idea how it happened.”
Kidman is bona fide A-list. Born in Hawaii in 1957 to Australian parents on student visas, she was raised in Australia and said she was first inspired to become an actor by watching Margaret Hamilton’s performance as the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. She started acting young, getting her first TV role at 16.
She broke into Hollywood in the 1990 action film Days of Thunder (where she met Tom Cruise, whom she would marry, then later divorce in 2001) and has since gone on to star in films including Eyes Wide Shut (again with Cruise), Moulin Rouge!, The Hours, The Stepford Wives and Before I Go To Sleep. More recently, she has ventured back into TV, appearing in Big Little Lies, Special Ops: Lioness and forthcoming Netflix show The Perfect Couple.
Ji-young Yoo as Mercy
Mercy is a recent Colombia University graduate who has moved to Hong Kong for a fresh start, but can’t seem to escape her past.
Yoo herself is a relatively new name on the scene: originally trained as a dancer, she switched to acting as a teenager. She's most recently starred in the film Smoking Tigers, where she plays a Korean-American teenager trying to fit in at school while dealing with her parents' separation. She's also set to appear in upcoming film Freaky Tales, alongside Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn.
“It’s not often you get an opportunity to be in a show opposite Nicole Kidman and to go and shoot in Hong Kong for six months,” she told WWD about her role as Mercy. “It was a really difficult role and the show is not a lighthearted show, but it was a very fulfilling process for me.”
Sarayu Blue as Hilary Starr
Hilary rounds out the trio of women. She confides to Margaret in the trailer that her marriage to David is falling apart, and her husband hardly spends any time with her.
Sarayu Rao, otherwise known as Sarayu Blue, is an American actor. Born to Indian Telugu parents, she started acting in the early Noughties and had her breakthrough in 2007 film Lions for Lambs. Since then, she has gone on to appear in Veep, Bones, Agents of Shield and Grey's Anatomy among many other TV shows.
Jack Huston as David Starr
David is Hilary’s husband, and the pair have a troubled relationship; it's hinted in the trailer that he's cheating on her.
Huston, who plays David, is British: born in 1982 to a British aristocratic mother and an American father, he decided to become an actor at the age of six after playing the lead role in a school production of Peter Pan. Since then, he's appeared in Twilight film Eclipse, HBO's Boardwalk Empire as disfigured gangster Richard Harrow, and Night Train to Lisbon. In 2020, he also appeared in Fargo as corrupt Kansas City Police Detective, Odis Weff.
Brian Tee as Clarke
Clarke is Margaret’s husband, who also suffers a traumatic loss in the series – which in turn impacts their marriage.
Tee is Japanese American: born Jae-Beom Takata in Okinawa Prefecture, his family moved to America when he was two. He adopted the name Brian Tee after being rejected by a director for having a Japanese last name; over the course of his career, he’s appeared in films including The Wolverine, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Jurassic World.
