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Sonoya Mizuno of ‘Devs’ and Her Sisters Are Hollywood’s Next Royal Family


“We each of us had our thing, our exercise,” Sonoya says. (Their father, thousands of miles away, was so aesthetically inclined that to this day his art-filled home is used for commercial photo shoots.) And just outside in the garden, or close by in the kitchen, their mother encouraged them to express themselves through art and movement. It was rural England in the 1980s, and they were a mixed-race family with a single mother. They say they weren’t exactly fighting off party invitations.

“It was actually quite hard to fit in at schools,” says Miya.

“We’re definitely kind of like a strange-looking family because we were six children, all half-Japanese, with a white mother, growing up in very rural Somerset, and it was very unusual for that time, or maybe even now, for there to be families like that,” says Sonoya. “We very much stuck together.”

So they painted. They danced. They sang arias. They cooked. Their mother died when they were still relatively young, and the older children helped parent the younger ones. Their childhood hobbies turned into adult professions, even as they had to take up side-hustles, one brother becoming a pest-control worker, the sisters taking on odd jobs. Eventually, it paid off.

“None of us work in investment banking,” Mariya jokes, summing up the Mizuno family destiny. “My mum used to make this joke that she had six children so she could have one dentist, one doctor, and one lawyer.”

“But we ended up being the same,” Maya says.

“Bummer!” jokes Sonoya.

Older sister Saya is a painter, designer, and landscape architect. Jinya is the head technician in an arts gallery. Tomoya is the head chef at a boutique hotel and a DJ. And the three younger sisters’ work—Sonoya’s acting, Miya’s photography, and Mariya’s AD work—is so closely tied that it led them to the same set for the high-concept, futuristic Devs.

A production still of Sonoya in Devs, taken by Miya

Being on set together “meant that someone always had your back, if you were having a bad day, one of your sisters would be there to catch you,” Mariya says. They ate lunch together. After long, grueling hours, they carpooled home together. During tired moments, Miya would show them still photographs she had taken. “We would celebrate together,” Miya says. When Sonoya had difficult scenes to film, she says, “it really was such a support having my sisters there because at the end of the day I know that I could just see their faces.” For her sisters, watching her do takes was difficult in its own way. Miya says she would have to remind herself, again and again, “It’s just TV! It’s not real!”



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Who Is Sonoya Mizuno? Get to Know the 'Crazy Rich Asians' and 'Maniac' Actress


You may not know Sonoya Mizuno by name—yet—but you’ve definitely seen her before. Maybe it was in Ex Machina, in which the 32-year-old made her acting debut opposite Oscar Isaac. Or perhaps you spotted her in Annihilation, La La Land, or Beauty and the Beast. You most likely saw her this summer, thanks to the one-two punch of starring roles in blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians and Netflix’s sci-fi thriller Maniac.

In Crazy Rich Asians Mizuno stands out as Araminta, the over-the-top bride who greets Rachel (Constance Wu) and Nick (Henry Golding) with a giant bunch of balloons, rents an entire island for her bachelorette party, and literally walks on water down the aisle. Then the actress transformed herself by putting on a truly iconic wig and oversize frames to play Dr. Azumi Fujita, the doctor behind a morally questionable drug study in Maniac.

Yeah, those characters are played by the same person. Proof alone that Mizuno is a chameleon.

PHOTO: Warner Bros.

PHOTO: Netflix

More proof: Despite Mizuno starring in two of the biggest hits of the summer, she remains relatively anonymous in the public eye. When we met at her favorite East Village coffee shop, nobody asked for a selfie. No autographs are given. No one sneaked a covert photo from the other side of the room. Mizuno likes it that way.

“I swear, honestly, nobody will ever recognize me,” she says with a shrug. “I just don’t think I’m that kind of person, which is totally fine by me.”

Case in point: Mizuno was recently on the set of Devs, an upcoming FX sci-fi series from writer-director Alex Garland, when a high-profile actor kept talking about how much he loved Crazy Rich Asians and Maniac…without realizing she was the lead in both. “He was like, ‘Whoa, that was you? Both of them?!'” she jokes. “I blew his mind, and he could not get over it. I love surprising people like that.”

Shiseido Essential Energy LA Event

PHOTO: Michael Bezjian/Getty Images

Maybe that’s because Mizuno is also still surprised that this year has been so big. “It’s so funny to me, what it looks like from the other side,” she says. “Because there were a few years in there where I was auditioning for everything and working my ass off, but I wasn’t getting jobs.”

“I was stealing toilet paper from acting class because I couldn’t afford to buy it,” she continues. “I went through all that kind of stuff—the hustle that most actors go through—and now here we are, and everything is coming out at the same time. It took a lot to get here.”

Her first-ever acting role, as robot Kyoko in Ex Machina, was a huge gamble. Mizuno, a successful dancer who studied at the Royal Ballet School, left her company in London on a gut feeling that she’d get the role. Her instinct was right: It changed from a small part as a girl in a closet to one of the most memorable (and viral) scenes from the movie, when Mizuno and Isaac do a surreal, coordinated dance to “Get Down Saturday Night.”

“It’s a roller coaster, this industry,” Mizuno says. “It’s continuously throwing caution into the wind and hoping you get the job. But I’m in for the ride.”

After Ex Machina, Mizuno started honing her craft with acting teachers like Mario Campanaro in Los Angeles. She got a few parts; first as one of Emma Stone’s friends in La La Land, followed by a dance cameo in Garland’s sci-fi thriller Annihilation. But she put all her eggs into the Crazy Rich Asians basket after she met director Jon M. Chu at a K-pop concert.

“I was hard up for jobs,” she says, “so I did something you really shouldn’t. After I auditioned, I sent Jon another tape of me doing Araminta just in case, because I really wanted the part.” The move freaked her out—she felt like she was presenting herself as “a neurotic actor”—so she went back to London and started researching universities to study English. “I was downloading a prospectus for King’s College University when I got the call that I got the job. After that, I decided that maybe I can hold on for a bit longer.”

“If you don’t get opportunities to act, you don’t get better, so you don’t get parts. And if you’re stopped from acting because of your ethnicity, how can you progress?”

But as wonderful as Crazy Rich Asians was for representation, Mizuno was in the front lines for backlash of not being “Asian enough.” (Both she and leading man Henry Golding were criticized for being biracial.) It upset her at the time, because she’s proud to be part Japanese, part Argentinian, and part English. “It’s annoying because people have a double standard,” she says. “It’s OK for white people to play someone from any country, with any accent or background. But if you’re Asian, you can only play what your true ethnicity is? It doesn’t measure up. People need to be careful about saying things like that, because in thinking that they’re being open-minded, what they’re actually doing is facetious.”

She hopes this will be a learning experience for those who were quick to judge. “At the end of the day, I’m not a political activist,” Mizuno says. “I’m just an actor doing the work that I think I can represent in the right way. I’ll keep doing that regardless of what people or trolls might say.”

Mizuno loves acting, first and foremost, but she appreciates that it also offers the opportunity to help young Asian—and biracial—people feel seen. She grew up in the English countryside, where she and her five siblings were the only Asian people in their primary school. (She jokes they were the “Asian Von Trapp family” because the family sang The Sound of Music while cleaning the house.) Since she didn’t see other people who resembled her in real life, she looked up to the few Asian actresses she saw onscreen. “I remember admiring Lucy Liu, Rinko Kikuchi, and Sandra Oh and feeling drawn to them just by the fact that they were Asian,” she says. “Even though I didn’t have much [else] in common with them.”

Shiseido Makeup Tokyo Launch Event

PHOTO: Keith Tsuji/Getty Images

Now she’s an actress and a beauty ambassador for Shiseido’s global beauty campaigns, and she hopes to make young Asian women feel beautiful. “When I was younger, I wanted to be more like the girls with blond hair and blue eyes because they were the ones who were popular,” she explains. “They were the ones in makeup ads. Now, hopefully, things are shifting, and they’ll want to be themselves.”

That’s why Mizuno wants to build her career on roles that have meaning to her. Roles that aren’t too similar or portray stereotypical Asians. It’s what guided her toward Maniac, because doing the series meant transforming herself and staying with the character for a long time. Next up, Devs will be her biggest role yet. She plays Lily Chan, a computer engineer investigating her secretive tech company employer after the murder of her boyfriend.

In fact, her conversations about Asian representation with director Garland, whom she considers a friend, partially led to his creating an Asian lead. (Mizuno describes it as a “chicken and egg” situation.) “If you don’t get opportunities to act, you don’t get better, so you don’t get parts,” she explains. “And if you’re stopped from acting because of your ethnicity, how can you progress? With that in mind, Alex wrote [Lily] as Asian so no one could dispute it.” In spite of their friendship, she called filming Devs the “most grueling, intense audition process I’ve ever done.”

“For once I feel like it’s OK to have these big ambitions.”

What does the future hold after that? For Mizuno, it’s balancing drama, comedy, and theater roles with work that isn’t just defined by her ethnicity. “There are so many things that I could never even have dreamt to have happened that happened, so for once I feel like it’s OK to have these big ambitions,” she says. Those ambitions include hopefully one day playing the lead in Cabaret as well as Tina Chow, a half-Japanese model and activist who contracted AIDS in the eighties and tried to cure herself naturally with meditation. (Mizuno’s ready to option the rights now, if the right person is reading this.)

Until then, Mizuno is content drinking a drip coffee at her neighborhood spot, scrolling through Instagram photos of dogs, and keeping out of the spotlight. “It’s important to keep a kind of mystery,” she says. “It’s more fun that way, and isn’t that what this whole thing is all about?”

Alyse Whitney is a writer and editor at Bon Appétit. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @alysewhitney.





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How Actress Sonoya Mizuno is Changing the Perception of Multi-Ethnic Beauty


As a former ballerina, Sonoya Mizuno has some serious makeup skills. “I used to wear loads of it for performances, so I can contour and apply fake eyelashes like a pro,” she says. Even after stepping away from the stage a few years ago and reinventing herself as a full-blown chameleon on the big screen, playing everything from a disco-dancing robot in Ex Machina to a Crazy Rich Asian, the always-adventurous, Japanese-English-Argentinian stunner continues to push the beauty boundaries—on and off the red carpet. “It’s fun to channel a different mood and character through makeup,” she tells Glamour recently in NYC.

With that philosophy, it’s no surprise that global beauty brand Shiseido would tap her as the new front woman for their latest makeup collection. Still, in a world where the industry’s top players have historically and habitually featured the idealized standards of Asian beauty (long straight hair, pearly skin, monolid eyes), casting the 30-year-old mixed-race actress in a major campaign marks a huge step forward for inclusivity and representation among Asian women.

We sat down with Mizuno as she got ready for the launch of her new campaign. Here, she opens up about being multi-ethnic, taking a hair risk, and the one J-beauty innovation she says keeps her face “right.”

Glamour: What’s the one beauty rule you swear by?

Sonoya Mizuno: It’s really boring, but it works. I drink a glass of water and half a lemon as soon as I wake up. I heard that it’s supposed to balance your body’s pH. Not sure if that’s true, but to be honest, it really helps with bloating.

Glamour: What are your non-negotiable skin care products?

SM: I’ve got combination skin, so it’s difficult to find things that are the right consistency. But Shiseido’s Essential Energy is the perfect lightweight serum-moisturizer hybrid that gives me a nice dewy glow. I love everything about it—the texture, the smell, and the pot is really pretty, which is always a plus. I also use its SPF 50 every day. I find most sunscreens are heavy, but this one doesn’t clog me up at all.

Glamour: What’s the one J-beauty innovation we all need in our lives?

SM: I bought a face roller in Japan years ago—it makes giving yourself a proper facial massage kind of fun. If I’m good about doing it, it helps keep my face lifted, tight, and right.

Glamour: What’s the biggest beauty mistake you’ve ever made?

SM: I was a child of the nineties and used to pluck my eyebrows non-stop. Mine were so thin, but in my defense, that was the look back then. They’ve grown back for the most part, but there are still bits that I don’t think will ever fill in. It’s fine, though, because there are plenty of tools, products, and pros that can work some brow magic.

Glamour: What’s the best makeup trick you’ve picked up on set?

SM: Primer is a miracle worker. My skin can get quite shiny and oily, so if I use a touch of primer underneath foundation, it makes the biggest difference.

Glamour: Your new pixie cut is killer. What’s your holy grail hair product for keeping it in check?

SM: I cut it for a job, and I have admit: Having short hair is much harder than I thought, especially when it’s super thick like mine. When I wake up in the morning, it’s literally sticking up everywhere. But I have a secret method: I’ll throw in a little Aveda Confixor when my hair’s still damp, then blow-dry with a durag on. I let my hair cool before I take it off and it behaves all day.

Glamour: Seems like you’re always down for a hair transformation. What’s the next big thing you want to try?

SM: Many, many years ago my mom used to have short blond hair and I always remember thinking how amazing she looked. I’ve got the cut, so now I just need the platinum color!

Glamour: You’re multi-ethnic—part Japanese, British, and Argentinian. How has that translated into your attitude towards beauty? Did you ever feel like you didn’t fit the “ideal” standards?

SM: For most of my childhood, I grew up in the countryside of England where it was very suburban—there weren’t a lot of people who were multicultural like my family. It was a place where the blond and brunette girls in school were considered gorgeous. And because of that, I remember feeling like I wasn’t good enough. But as I got older and experienced the world outside of my hometown, I started seeing more people like me. Now, I don’t compare myself to anyone. I look the way I do, and I totally embrace that.

Glamour: What’s the one thing you wish you could steal from your Crazy Rich Asians character Araminta?

SM: So many! I’d take her energy and confidence for sure. Let’s throw in her money and insane wedding, too, while we’re at it.

Glamour: What’s your go-to getting-ready music?

SM: It depends on what kind of phase I’m going through, but at the moment, I’m all about Awkafina’s new album [In Fina We Trust]. She’s so good and it’s so funny. I literally laugh out loud when I listen to it.

Glamour: What’s your favorite emoji?

SM: My signature response is the implacable face with the straight lines for the eyes and mouth: ?. It’s the perfect way to say, “That was funny, but I’m not going to laugh” or “What you said was nice, but I’m not going to say thank you.” It’s appropriate for like 99 percent of text messages.

Glamour: What’s your best self-care tip?

SM: Sleep. I drench my sheets in lavender essential oil before I lay down and that helps a lot. Still working on getting more of it though. I swear by yoga, too.

Glamour: What smell always makes you smile?

SM: The scent of a Sunday roast, which my family would have every week growing up. It reminds me of them and all the good laughs we would share together.

Glamour: Who’s the person who inspires you most?

SM: I’m one of six and would be lost without my siblings. We’re really close. They always understand what I’m going through.

Glamour: What’s the one piece of beauty advice you’d give to your 13-year-old self?

SM: Be kind to yourself. I think back to all those ballet classes that would end in tears, and now, I’m like what was that for? I was harder on myself than I needed to be, but I guess in some ways it was good training for Hollywood—and life.



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