Arden Cho

The three of them are on a sofa, eating, arguing about food, and one of them is not quite there. That is Rumi in KPop Demon Hunters (2025), and Arden Cho plays her as the leader who is carrying something and cannot put it down. The film's songs and drawing do the showing off; Cho does the quieter job, the spoken scenes between numbers, and lands them, which is what a voice cast is for. We went in expecting a toy advert with a beat and found ourselves caring what happened to three girls sharing snacks, because Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans give the friendship enough small business to feel lived in, and Cho, May Hong and Ji-young Yoo play it as if the sofa were theirs.

Before that she was a television face for a decade. She broke through as Kira Yukimura, a kitsune, on Teen Wolf (2014–2016), recurring first and then a regular, and in 2022 she led Partner Track as Ingrid Yun, an ambitious lawyer in a legal drama that was cancelled after one season. She turned up as June in Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024). It is a career with far more television than cinema in it, and the film work we have reviewed has been heard rather than seen.

The second of those is The Last House (2026), where she is Adult Ruth, and it tells us less about her than it should. Louis Leterrier's film recasts its children as they grow, which is its boldest idea, but the script treats each new age as a fresh start, so the adults arrive with no grudges, no secrets and no damage worth the name. Cho is handed a woman who has been shut in for years and has nothing to show for it. We were bored by that stretch and then irritated at being bored, and none of the irritation was hers to answer for; an actor cannot play a history the script has not written.

What she keeps being asked to play is a woman between two things: half-human and half-demon in KPop Demon Hunters, the ambitious outsider at a law firm in Partner Track. She has said Rumi drew on her own life: "Being born in America, feeling American but having people treat me like I'm not, trying to figure out my identity as an Asian-American, as a Korean-American, as a woman." That is a good reason to cast her. It is not yet evidence of what she can do with a camera on her face for two hours, because nobody has given her the two hours. She is producing her next one, Perfect Girl, which looks like someone who has stopped waiting to be cast well.