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Remember Cho From Harry Potter? Here’s What She’s Doing Now

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Cho Chang broke millions of hearts on screen, but Katie Leung nearly walked away from acting altogether once the cameras stopped rolling.

Katie Leung was a teenager living in Scotland when she beat out more than 3,000 other hopefuls to land the role of Cho Chang, Harry Potter’s first love interest, debuting in 2005’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. She stayed with the franchise through 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, but the fame that came with the part wasn’t the fairy tale it looked like from the outside. Behind the scenes, Leung was fielding racist abuse and serious doubts about whether she belonged in front of a camera at all.

• Leung beat out over 3,000 other candidates to play Cho Chang, debuting in 2005’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and staying through Deathly Hallows – Part 2.
• The sudden fame brought racist online abuse and deep insecurity about her acting, pushing her to step away and study art, design, and photography before enrolling at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
• She rebuilt her career on stage as Er-Hong in the 2012 production of Wild Swans, then moved into TV with One Child, Father Brown, and the 2018 ITV thriller White Dragon, plus film work opposite Jackie Chan in The Foreigner.

The Cost of Fame at Hogwarts

Landing a role in the biggest film franchise on the planet should have been a dream outcome for a young actress, but for Leung it came with a price most fans never saw. The scrutiny that followed her casting included racist harassment directed at her online, and it fed a growing insecurity about her own ability as an actress. By the time the series wound down, Leung was genuinely conflicted about whether she wanted anything more to do with the entertainment industry.

The spotlight that came with playing Cho Chang left Leung questioning whether acting was even something she wanted to keep doing.

Stepping Back Before Stepping Up

Rather than chase another audition, Leung did something few franchise stars do at the height of their visibility — she left. She enrolled at the University of the Arts London to study art and design, then pursued photography at Edinburgh College of Art. It wasn’t until she felt ready to commit fully to performing that she enrolled at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, treating her return to acting as a craft to be trained rather than a fame she’d simply inherited.

Rebuilding on Stage

That formal training paid off almost immediately. Leung made her professional theatrical debut as Er-Hong in the 2012 adaptation of Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, staged at the American Repertory Theater and London’s Young Vic. From there she picked up further critical praise for The World of Extreme Happiness at the National Theatre and You For Me For You at the Royal Court — the kind of credits that build an actor’s reputation in the UK’s theater scene far more than a single blockbuster franchise ever could.

Small Screen and Back to the Big One

While she was earning her stage credentials, Leung was also quietly building a solid television résumé, starring in the BBC miniseries One Child in 2014, along with Run and Father Brown, before headlining the 2018 ITV thriller White Dragon, also released internationally as Strangers. On film, she returned to major studio work in 2017’s The Foreigner, playing the daughter of Jackie Chan’s character — proof that the girl who once played Ravenclaw’s star Quidditch seeker had built a career that stretched well past Hogwarts on her own terms.

By the end of 2018, Leung’s résumé read less like a former child star clinging to one franchise and more like a working actress who’d deliberately rebuilt herself from the stage up — from the Young Vic to primetime ITV, with White Dragon standing as her freshest credit and a clear sign there was plenty more to come.