INTERVIEW
Vee Pandey | 21/12/2025
Isabella speaks with deliberate warmth, not in performance, but by choice. For Isabella, her worldview is shaped by the dance studios she spent her childhood in, instead of cinema seats, by encouragement rather than expectation. Before stepping into the ornate universe of Bridgerton, Isabella was learning how to listen to her instincts, how to move through the world with curiosity and faith in what’s meant to be. Arriving in an industry as she describes that rarely imagines someone like her at its centre, and discovering that optimism, far from naïveté, can be a discipline — one that has carried her from rehearsal rooms to one of television’s most visible series.
Growing up in Hong Kong in a family that, by her own admission, “really doesn’t watch movies or TV shows,” aside from Barbie films she loved and Marvel movies her brother put on. Dance, not cinema, was her first language, guided by a formative teacher from age ten to fifteen who showed her that the arts could be more than an after-school hobby.
Her parents, who grew up in Canada, brought an unusually international outlook to a traditionally conservative conversation: an Asian daughter pursuing the arts. “It’s quite untraditional, especially for Asian families,” she says, but they encouraged both her and her computer-science-studying brother to follow what made them feel most alive. “You have a lot of Asian families who are like, there’s no way you’re going into the arts. That must be a joke,” she says. “But my parents…just really encouraged me and my brother to pursue what we were interested in and passionate about.”
By the time Bridgerton first dropped on streaming, Isabella was watching it like everyone else - utterly unprepared to see herself there one day. “The idea that I would see myself there, especially as an Asian woman in a Regency period English show, just kind of didn’t ever cross my mind,” she says.
The casting process went on so long that she began negotiating with herself. “You kind of start trying to reason with yourself and manage your expectations and tell yourself that, okay, well, probably it’s not going to happen,” she remembers. “The longer you have to marinate with it, the more you kind of knock yourself into reality.”
Reality, as it turned out, involved walking into an established juggernaut as the new girl. “I remember that first day walking into the table read, I was so nervous,” she says. “Everyone knows each other, everyone’s friends, they’ve been doing it for years. It’s kind of like all of a sudden joining a family.” But the cast disarmed her nerves within minutes, greeting the newcomers with a warmth that mirrored their onscreen personas, “almost like the best parts of their characters in an actual human person.”
Her character Posy arrives with what Isabella calls “quite a sunny kind of disposition,” and the overlap between them was immediate. “I think I’m someone who almost unconsciously always thinks on the bright side,” she says. “I’ve been told in the past that maybe it’s too naive of me, but my number one instinct is always to assume good rather than assume bad.”
That instinct threads through Posy’s dialogue: constantly defending bad situations, insisting they are not that bad, or trying to convince other characters to see the upside. “I feel that a lot in my life,” Isabella says. “If I let myself dwell too much on trying to analyse a certain situation, or maybe there’s something malicious here, it kind of brings me into a head space that I don’t enjoy being in.”
Dress, Magda Butrym. Tights, Falke. Shoes, Kalda. Jewellery, Dinosaur Designs.
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Jacket, Kent and Curwen. Skirt, The Frankie Shop. Boots, Izie. Jewellery, Dinosaur Designs.
Playing Posy intensified her own optimism. “Posey is definitely an embodiment of this kind of positive energy,” she says. “It was great to play a character like this, because it then seeped into my own life and kind of made me think positively as well.” The interviewer laughs and admits, “I’m a glass half full girl,” and Isabella does not miss a beat: “As you should,” she replies.
Before the pastel gowns and orchestral pop covers, Isabella was steeped in more shadowy worlds - Black Doves and 1899 among them. “A lot of my characters have been very affected by things,” she says. “Bad things are happening to them, and it’s less so about them being the ones to inflict too much action.”
Posy demanded a different muscle. Instead of asking, “What trauma is she carrying?” Isabella found herself wondering, “How can I make someone smile here?” Choices narrowed down to the tilt of a smile or the exact timing of a line that might elicit a laugh or a knowing, “Ooh, what’s happening here?” from the audience. The shift, she says, was “a huge relief”: less emotional excavation, more delight in crafting tiny moments of joy.
Like many young actors, Isabella has known the suffocating hum of an inner voice insisting she is not enough. Yet Bridgerton marked a turning point: “I think Bridgerton was the first project where I felt a significant drop in that feeling.”
Part of that came from not being the only new girl. Sharing most of her scenes with fellow newcomers like Michelle, Katie, and Yerin lifted some of the weight; it no longer felt like “there’s a lot of expectation on me” alone. The other part was the environment itself: a tight-knit core of cast, crew, producers and writers intent on making everyone feel they were exactly where they were meant to be. “Everyone really wanted to see you succeed,” she recalls, and in that atmosphere, the nagging sense of being an intruder finally softened.
Shirt and Skirt, Magda Butrym. Tights, Falke. Boots, Kalda. Jewellery, Dinosaur Designs.
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Transforming into other people for a living has taught Isabella how crucial it is to stay anchored in who she is off-camera. She describes herself as an extrovert in the truest sense: someone recharged by the presence of people she loves - parents, and friends who knew her long before anyone called her to set.
With them, careers drop to the bottom of the conversation. Afternoons of mahjong, comfort rewatches of childhood animations, and the familiar rhythm of dance classes are all ways she reminds herself that the roles she plays are work, not identity. “They’re just reminders of who I am, and that what I’ve been spending so much time working on is not me,” she says.
Ask Isabella about a dream project and she circles back, inevitably, to dance. She lights up talking about the giddy thrill of films like Step Up and how meaningful it would be to fuse the two art forms that shaped her most - movement and performance into a single story.
At the same time, she is hungry for a challenge. Having stepped into comedy, she now wants to stretch towards the opposite pole: “I would love to maybe play a villain,” she admits, relishing the idea of finally being the one who “does” rather than the one things happen to. Action, too, calls to her sense of restlessness - anything that keeps her learning, moving, “really stimulated” in an industry where stillness can quickly spiral into self-doubt.
Hope, she admits, is sometimes a full-contact sport. “In this industry, it’s really easy to, once you stop doing things for a while, feel like you have no more hope and nothing is ever going to come,” she says. “So just being excited and kind of imagining the further possibilities keeps me kind of eager and positive.”
Across the Zoom screen, I say “All you’ve got is hope,” quoting my mum and half-apologising that it sounds a bit like faith. Isabella laughs. “Yeah, I’m with you on that,” she replies. It is the sort of exchange that sums her up perfectly: grounded, grateful, mischievously honest and always, insistently, looking on the bright side.
Creative Alice Gee & Rogelio Arcos @alicesgee @kiddrog
Photography Rogelio Arcos @kiddrog
Styling Elena Garcia @_elenagarcia
MUA Francesca Brazzo @francescabrazzo
Hair Styling Ross Kwan @rosskwan
Hair Styling Assistant
BTS Vee Pandey @veepandey
Shirt Dress, Georgie Campbell. Jacket, Kulakovsky. Tights, Falke. Boots, Kalda. Jewellery, Dinosaur Designs.
