When Isabella Wei was cast in the hit Netflix mystery series 1899 in 2020, she was 16 years old and still at school. Now 18, Wei is on the verge of becoming a household name in her home city, a rise to success she credits, in part, to the youth drama programme she became involved with as a teenager.
She stars as Ling Yi in the noirish drama, which landed on the streaming, follows a multilingual cast on an immigrant ship headed for New York in the year 1899, when a mysterious turn of events unfolds, yielding mind-bending riddles for its passengers. Wei’s character is a Cantonese-speaking 17-year-old from Hong Kong who is trafficked as a comfort woman, disguised as a geisha. “My character has a lot of secrets,” she says.
