Eric Kripke’s hit superhero series The Boys is all the rage right now. The fifth and final season of the show, which premiered on April 8, is currently the most-watched series on Amazon Prime Video, according to streaming data collection website FlixPatrol. Starring Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Antony Starr, Erin Moriarty, Jessie T. Usher and Karen Fukuhara, the latest instalment is raising the stakes higher than ever.

“The five seasons has been the slow descent into madness for [supervillain] Homelander, and this season we thought, ‘Well, let’s take him the craziest he could possibly get,’ which is, he decided that he wants to be a god,” showrunner Kripke told Deadline.

One of the characters fans are most excited about this season is Kimiko Miyashiro, aka The Female, played by Fukuhara. The character speaks for the first time this season, with the help of speech therapy and “so much f***ing TikTok”. She previously communicated non-verbally, primarily through sign language. “Finding her voice and figuring out what it’s like to be a part of the speaking world was a huge challenge for me,” Fukuhara revealed in an interview with Gold Derby.

So what do we know about Karen Fukuhara?

She’s been a martial artist since childhood

Karen Fukuhara was born in February 1992 in Los Angeles to Japanese parents. She grew up with a younger brother who she described to Vogue as a “little troublemaker”. Fukuhara learned karate and took acting lessons as a kid, and enjoyed watching Japanese shows such as Pokémon, per Timid magazine. She competed in martial arts at high school, per Grumpy magazine, and became skilled at sword fighting. She studied sociology and theatre at UCLA.

Where have you seen her before?

Fukuhara has worked in Japanese film and television as well as in Hollywood. She is fluent in Japanese and previously worked as a translator. She was also a reporter for NHK’s World Sports. However, she is best known for starring in films like Suicide Squad (2016) and Bullet Train (2022). She also voiced Haru in Netflix’s Pokémon Concierge and Lady Himi in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (2023).

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