If you haven’t seen “K-Pop Demon Hunters” by now, it may be time.
The movie, first released on Aug. 26, is now the most watched movie ever on Netflix with more than 325 million views globally and streamed for more than 500 million hours (we did the math and that equals to more than 61,000 years). Everyone, we mean everyone, is talking about KDH from Bad Bunny on SNL to Jimmy Fallon to former Dallas Cowboy’s defensive end Marcellus Wiley.
The animated film is about a K-Pop superstar trio Rumi, (Arden Cho), Mira (May Hong), and Zoey (Ji-young Yoo) who are secret demon hunters who use their music to protect their fans from supernatural danger.
But one thing we think more people should be talking about is that Arden Cho — the voice of Rumi, the superstar with the long purple braid who will likely be on every front door step this Halloween — is Texan.
Cho was born in Amarillo. Her family spent two years in West Texas, where her dad taught Taekwondo, before they moved to San Antonio, Dallas, and then Plano, according to a 2022 interview with The Backstage Experience.
Cho said her father has an entrepreneurial spirit, so they moved a lot, spending half of her younger years in Texas before moving to Minnesota during her high school years. Cho is the eldest daughter and first-born child of Korean immigrants. She said her birth order has impacted who she is as a person and as an actor.
“You feel this burden of responsibility to be great, to do something amazing,” Cho said on the Still Watching Netflix podcast. Like many Asian American families, Cho said her parents weren’t sure about her choice to pursue acting when she moved to Los Angeles.
Early in her career, Cho said she was told she “needed to go back to her own country” if she ever wanted to be the lead in a movie but was left confused because she’s from Texas, she said in a recent podcast interview with Nerd Reactor,
“I feel like the heart is always going to be southern,” Cho said about her upbringing. “When I’m down South, the y’alls come right back.”
Although these days she lives in L.A., you know what they say, you can take the girl out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the girl. Which comes in handy because aside from being a part of the number one film on Netflix ever, Cho is a world champion poker player whose game of choice is Texas Hold ‘Em.
“I’ve actually learned a lot about life in poker. It’s a game where it doesn’t matter who you are, what size you are, what gender you are, you just sit down at the table and you have chips and the goal is to win all the chips,” Cho said on Still Watching.
