‘XO, Kitty’ star Anthony Keyvan on life after ‘Love, Victor’

Anthony Keyvan never set out to become a beacon of representation for queer Iranian and Filipino Americans. But with his recent roles as a romantic interest to the titular gay protagonist in Hulu’s “Love, Victor” and as an all-American jock at an international Korean school in Netflix’s “XO, Kitty,” Keyvan, 24, is part of the next generation of actors who want to make television representation more expansive.

“I feel like I’ve won the lottery in a lot of ways,” Keyvan, who has been performing for the past two decades, said of viewers’ reactions to his various characters. “It’s a responsibility I will take on time and time again because I know it has affected people in such a positive way.”

“XO, Kitty,” which returns to Netflix on Thursday for its second season, is a spinoff of author Jenny Han’s acclaimed film trilogy “To All the Boys.” The series follows the youngest Covey sister, teen matchmaker Kitty (Anna Cathcart), as she attends the fictional Korean International School of Seoul in an attempt to reconnect with her late mother’s roots. Keyvan plays Quincy “Q” Shabazian, an openly gay track athlete and an American exchange student who becomes Kitty’s best friend and closest confidante.

Like the original “To All the Boys” films, “XO, Kitty” features a young Asian-American woman as the romantic lead. However, expanding his fictional universe, Han wanted to further diversify the spinoff by introducing characters of different ethnicities and sexualities. At the end of the first season, Kitty, who finds herself having feelings for her ex-boyfriend and two of their classmates, realizes that she is bisexual. The second installment finds Kitty navigating her increasingly complicated love life at school — largely with the help of Q — while tracking down her estranged extended family in South Korea.

While other coming-of-age shows starring LGBTQ characters may focus on the inherent anxiety of coming out, Keyvan said he believes that “XO, Kitty,” with its emphasis on treating queerness as a non -issue, “gives hope to young queer people or questioning people that their lives don’t have to look a certain way.”

“We are so used to the queer experience being a very traumatic thing for people, and that the coming story is extremely traumatic, chaotic and difficult to navigate. And while that’s true for a lot of people, it’s refreshing to see a different take on it,” said Keyvan, whose character falls for an athletic rival in the new season. “With ‘XO, Kitty,’ queerness is normalized and it’s not something that’s looked down upon or something that you feel like you have to suppress with our characters.”

Image: Love, Victor
Michael Cimino and Anthony Keyvan in “Love, Victor”.Greg Gayne / Hulu

Around the time he landed the role in early 2022, Keyvan sat down with then-showrunners Han and Sascha Rothchild to discuss his character’s arc. It was during that meeting that Keyvan asked the writers to make Q half-Filipino and half-Iranian like him — an idea he said was met with immediate acceptance. But two seasons in, Keyvan said, Q, despite being considered one of the leads, is still very much “a surface-level character” who “helps push the plot forward” for other characters and has gotten little or no backstory aside from a few family references—a sharp criticism he said he’d be eager to discuss with the writers for a potential third season.

“XO, Kitty,” nevertheless feels like a natural continuation of Keyvan’s mission to bring parts of his own identity to his work. In 2021, he became famous for playing Rahim, a high school student who struggles to come out to his devout Muslim parents and seeks advice from the main character Victor Salazar (Michael Cimino), in “Love, Victor”. (Keyvan was cast, the producers decided to make his character Iranian American.) While playing a new potential love interest for the main character came with its fair share of critics, Keyvan said that playing Rahim marked the first time in his career that his work ” directly affected how people saw themselves and how they walked through this world.”

“It’s such an honor that I can’t even describe to you, to hear people of a Middle Eastern background or a Muslim background feel like they’re being seen through a queer person on TV who looks like them,” Keyvan said, adding, that like any person his age, he likes to keep up with the various messages, comments and video edits from fans. “In many of these countries it’s illegal to be gay or part of the queer community, so they have to suppress a lot of themselves all the time. And to see a character like Rahim on ‘Love, Victor’ being so outwardly himself and so unapologetically himself was something that definitely resonated with a lot of people.”

For Keyvan, the fact that there is a growing appetite for more diverse stories is a sign of the changing times. As a young actor who presents as “ethnically ambiguous,” Keyvan has often been cast to play Latino or Hispanic characters—”which I’m not,” he reiterated—but he “barely” gets any auditions for mixed-race characters races and instead usually get parts labeled as “open ethnicity”.

Having a creative team adamant about “creating a world full of diversity and inclusion” and casting characters authentically ultimately makes a big difference in bridging that gap, Keyvan said.

“There are so many mixed people in the world and I think it’s becoming more common now, but at least when I auditioned for the show, there were hardly any mixed characters on TV,” he said. “So it’s nice to see that not only is our lead, Anna, a mixed person playing a mixed person, but I get to do it in the same show and it’s normalized and celebrated.”

Although he harbors his own hopes of one day being able to tell his – and his immigrant parents’ – stories, Keyvan is keenly aware of the realities of the business. Despite the significant progress made by the Asian community in recent years, Keyvan noted that the visibility of other minority groups continues to lag in Hollywood, largely due to studios’ reluctance to fully commit to having different ensembles.

“It feels like almost a lot of times the industry does it for a few years and they say, ‘OK, we represented you, we gave you this,’ and then they move on to the next marginalized community.” he said, noting that Latino-led shows like “Love, Victor” and “One Day at a Time” have not been replaced with new ones. “And I worry that sometimes it’s just a little dirt or a little bit of time that we get as Asian people to make our mark in the industry and then they’ll move on to the next (group).

“I definitely think there’s still a lot more work to do,” he added. “I feel like with this new generation of creatives coming in, I’m more hopeful that we’ll get the equality that we deserve in this industry. I see a lot that gives me that hope, but I think ​​we have to keep working and keep talking about it.”