In the Celeste Ng's source novel , Ng kept Mia Warren's race deliberately vague and undefined. With the casting of Kerry Washington in the Mia Warren role in this adaptation, Warren became a black character. During an April 2020 interview with Terry Gross on the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air," Washington said, "when I met Celeste Ng, the writer, for the first time, she actually admitted to me that she had always thought of Mia as a woman of color, and that she had been drawn to the idea of writing Mia as a black woman. But she didn't feel like she had the authoritative voice to do that in the right way. And so she was kind of vague about her race in the novel. So it was exciting that we were in step with Celeste in diving into the places where she wanted to to grow out the book in ways that already lived in her."
