To Bully Or Be Bullied? New TV Show Bad Behaviour Forces Young Women To Decide

Pop culture hasn't shied away from bullying storylines, with Mean Girls and the Gossip Girl reboot being just two recent examples exploring the dynamics between female characters in high school. But Stan's new TV show Bad Behaviour strips back the comedic dialogue and social media references, and delves deep into the brutal and lifelong impact of high school bullying. 

Based on the memoir by Rebecca Starford, the four-part series follows what happens when protagonist Joanna bumps into her old classmate Alice, who is now a world-renowned musician. The encounter rattles Joanna, and thrusts her mind back to a decade earlier at Silver Creek — the isolated Aussie bushland campus of an exclusive girls' boarding school. It's there that Joanna was faced with the decision of whether to bully or be bullied.

Audiences observe Joanna's push-pull relationship with alpha female and classmate Portia, who wields power over the students with persuasion and popularity. As Joanna begins replicating Portia's problematic behaviour, she ends up playing a big part in tormenting fellow scholarship student, Alice.

Speaking to Refinery29 Australia, actor Yerin Ha (who portrays Alice) says that Bad Behaviour shows just how powerful the desire to belong can be in young women.

"As human beings, you want to feel like you belong, and be part of a group. You want to have shared common language with someone and feel wanted," says Ha. "Especially with girls, I just feel like the stakes are heightened."

But bullying doesn't necessarily stop at the school gates. Through Joanna and Portia's experiences, we can see how bad behaviour from childhood can be easily replicated in our adult lives. Realising she perhaps hasn't outgrown this behaviour, Joanna feels ashamed to find herself reverting to her teenage self.

While the actor is coy about her own experiences at an all-girls' high school, she says that she reflected on what she'd been through in order to portray the vulnerable Alice, who bears the brunt of Joanna and Portia's cruelty.

"I did do a lot of reflection on my own experience, that's for sure," she says, explaining that she tried to draw parallels between her experiences and those of her character, to portray the experience as truthfully as possible.

As the show interrogates the nature of female friendship, it hones in on multiple perspectives and Ha emphasises the importance of the series doing this.

"Teen years were hard for everyone and I think everyone experiences one end of the spectrum," she says.

"So, that's what we really tried to reflect in the show — what it means to be a witness or a bystander, what it is to be the victim, and what it is to be the person where you are so self-conscious, insecure and lonely that you feel like you have to be dominant."

At the helm of this TV project is acclaimed Aussie director, Corrie Chen. Born in Taiwan and raised in Australia, Chen has directed local series like Homecoming Queens and Five Bedrooms, and her involvement in Bad Behaviour was one of the biggest drawcards for Ha.

"I really wanted to work with a female Asian Australian director. That was a really big green tick for me," says Ha, who was born in Sydney to Korean parents.

"You don't get a lot of experiences on set where you have an Asian female director navigating a story that she is very passionate about telling."

Speaking of culture, Ha's character Alice is timid, conscientious and plays the cello, which somewhat resembles the stereotype of the reserved, high-achieving daughter of immigrants. But Ha insists that this was a mere coincidence, and that Alice wasn't just bullied because she's a woman of colour.

"It actually wasn't intentional," she says. "It was never really that Alice is picked because she's a person of colour or she's the outsider. I think she's just naturally an outsider in terms of her personality and how she carries herself."

Cultural representation in the entertainment industry is gradually improving, but Ha is still aware of the stereotyped roles Asian women can be thrust into on the audition circuit.

"As an Asian actress, I felt like I couldn't say no to roles [earlier in my career]. I had to take whatever was given to me," she reflects. "People always tell you about the power of no, but who does that really apply to?

On the privilege scale, I'm like, 'I need to pay the bills, pay rent and get a job. I can't just say no to things because I don't want to play a geek."

As her career has progressed, Ha has reached a position where she has been able to decline roles with "faith that there were going to be better roles out there". But she acknowledges that the "real struggle" of being typecast does continue for up-and-coming POC actors.

As she promotes Bad Behaviour and advocates for diversity on screen, Ha is in Budapest, filming season two of science fiction TV series, Halo. As for what's next? "Then I'll have to find another job," she laughs.

One thing's for sure, this won't be the last we'll see of her.