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

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

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

“We’re so used to the queer experience being a very traumatic thing for people and the coming-out story being extremely traumatic, chaotic and tough to navigate. And while that is true for a lot of people, it’s refreshing to see a different take on that,” 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 is looked down upon or something that you feel like you need to suppress with our characters.”

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 that 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 been given little to no backstory apart from a couple of family references — a pointed critique that he said he would be eager to discuss with the writers in 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 rose to fame for playing Rahim, a high school student who struggles to come out to his devout Muslim parents and seeks counsel from protagonist 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 to the protagonist came with its fair share of detractors, Keyvan said, playing Rahim marked the first time in his career when his work “directly impacted how people view themselves and how they walked through this world.”

“It is such an honor that I can’t even describe to you, hearing people from a Middle Eastern background or a Muslim background feeling like they are 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 a lot 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 am not,” he reiterated — but he “hardly” gets any auditions for mixed-race characters and instead usually gets parts labeled as “open ethnicity.”

Having a creative team that is 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 was auditioning for the show, there were hardly any mixed characters on television,” he said. “So it’s nice to see that not only our lead, Anna, is a mixed person playing a mixed person, but I also get to do that, as well, on the same show and it be normalized and celebrated.”

Although he harbors his own aspirations of one day being able to tell his — and his immigrant parents’ — own stories, Keyvan is acutely aware of the realities of the business. Despite the significant strides the Asian community has made in recent years, Keyvan noted that the visibility of other minority groups continues to lag in Hollywood, in large part because of the studios’ reluctance to commit fully to having diverse ensembles.

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

“I definitely think there’s still a lot more work to be done,” he added. “I feel like with this new generation of creatives coming in, I am more hopeful that we will get the equality that we deserve in this industry. I’m seeing a lot that is giving me that hope, but I guess we just have to keep working and keep talking about it.”