In the book series, Belly was depicted as a white woman via the original cover but in the new show, she is a mixed race teen with a Korean mother and white father. And I think it feels really natural to the show, to the characters and the story. And then, we also have a new character Cleveland, who is Filipino. We get to have like an Asian American family on the show.
And I think the diversity of characters is a piece of that, so it felt like a really great opportunity to showcase different kinds of talent. When I was approaching the adaptation, I wanted to really reflect the moment that we're living in. When speaking to CinemaBlend, the best-selling author said of bringing more inclusion for the streaming adaptation: The Summer I Turned Pretty gets to reflect Jenny Han’s Korean roots through Belly and is enhanced by the additional diversity within its cast. Times have obviously changed in the past thirteen years and the romance genre is much more inclusive in regard to to telling Asian-American stories, which was in part normalized by the To All The Boys series starring Lana Condor.
