Reina Hardesty

It’s easy to kill when you’ve buried the part of you that feels.

In Butterfly, Prime Video’s newest release, Reina Hardesty proves it. She steps into the shoes of Rebecca, a charismatic assassin who weaponizes playfulness with cruelty and conceals a tangled past behind a lethal façade. Offscreen, however, Hardesty’s own story couldn’t have been more different.

Growing up, her world revolved around movies, from the rich drama of Bollywood epics to the lavish stages of Moulin Rouge. She would escape into these stories, often reenacting them alone in her bedroom. “It just felt like this beautiful, safe space to let my imagination run wild, and I latched on to the acting aspect of it all,” she recalled. By eight, Hardesty was already sketching self-portraits with the word Hollywood—misspelled as “Holywood”— scribbled underneath.

Hardesty’s early passion for creative expressiveness never faded. From childhood reenactments to embracing the physical and emotional demands of her roles today, she has always viewed acting as a way to explore the human psyche from every possible angle.

“Being mixed Asian American [means] you already have a wider perspective of the world [since] you’re connected to two different countries,” she said. “I think acting is a really interesting way to explore all these different facets of humanity. It [lets] me live as many lives as possible and experience as many different perspectives as possible.”

That curiosity for different experiences was part of what made Butterfly so appealing. For Hardesty, transforming into a character who treads the fine line between vulnerability and ruthlessness was both a challenge and a rare opportunity.

“What I loved about [Rebecca] was that there was a lot to work with,” Hardesty said. “She isn’t your typical stoic, grizzled, sociopathic assassin. She’s very charismatic, she likes to mess with people.”

Among the people Rebecca provokes throughout the show is her estranged father, David Jung, played by Daniel Dae Kim. Believing herself to have been orphaned for most of her life, Rebecca is forced to revisit old wounds when her father reappears. That nuanced, push-and-pull dynamic between father and daughter was a hook for Hardesty.  

“I’m really interested in psychology and how we are affected by our parents in a lot of subconscious ways,” Hardesty explained. “I think that Rebecca hasn’t quite looked at the things that make her the way that she is. The actions she takes to feel closer to her dad and then immediately push him away, I find really relatable. It’s a bit childish, but I feel like a lot of us can get to that very primal, childish place when we’re around family members that we have a difficult past with.”

Playing such a layered character pushed Hardesty to consider the deeper motive behind Rebecca’s killer instincts. To her, the question at the heart of the character is simple: “What do you really want?”

“I feel like in this season, there’s a lot of trying to please her dad or Juno, or to feel loved, to feel accepted, to feel like she belongs,” she said. “It’d be really interesting to see who Rebecca is outside of these reactive things that she does. It’s like, who are you really? I don’t think she knows because she’s afraid to meet herself, [and] to [do that], she has to process all of the pain she’s gone through.”

Still, playing a character who acts without an emotional filter was rather liberating.

“I think we as humans are all so layered and have many complicated, conflicting feelings a lot of the time,” she shared. “[The] difference between Rebecca and how most people behave in society is we’ll have these big feelings [that] we’ll push away or shut down. What was so fun about Rebecca is that she'll feel something and she'll just go with it.”

That sense of freedom extended beyond slipping into Rebecca’s character. Much of Butterfly was filmed in South Korea, a place Hardesty quickly fell in love with. “I thought it was a beautiful place,” she expressed. “I love the culture, the energy of the people. I loved the food a little too much. I couldn’t stop eating tteokbokki and ganjang gejang.”

Nonetheless, the shoot was as physically intense as it was delicious.

“There’s so much training involved, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to be really good at my job as an assassin,” Hardesty said. “I had to be strong, fast, and scary. I think that was the hardest part overall, because I wanted it to feel convincing. I spent a couple [of] months before even going to Korea doing combat and firearms training to feel comfortable in my body. I wanted to express [Rebecca] as a character through these movements, rather than just me as an actor, [hoping] it looked good enough.”

Butterfly also gave Hardesty the chance to work closely with Kim. “He’s so supportive and kind,” she said. “Having him as our lead [and] executive producer [meant] I always felt like somebody had my back. We bonded over how difficult a lot of the shoot was, but also [had] fun creating characters together.”

Looking ahead, Hardesty hopes to continue chasing stories surrounding themes of collaboration and experimentation. “There’s so many different things that I want to explore,” she said. “What I love about acting and storytelling is [that] we can just get deeper and deeper into specific subjects. I’m really open to anything that just feels right.”

One of those possibilities is stepping behind the camera. “I think it would be really interesting to direct because that’s a totally different instrument of control over the story,” Hardesty said. “Instead of just expressing through my body and my voice, I can express it through the color of a door or an angle. That would be really fun to explore.”

If Rebecca buries the part of herself that feels, Hardesty does the opposite; she flourishes by embracing every emotion, perspective, and challenge, turning them into stories worth telling.

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Butterfly is set to premiere on Amazon Prime Video on August 13th, 2025.