Season 2 of XO, Kitty, which premiered on Netflix on Jan. 16, picks up right where Season 1 left off — resolving lingering questions and cliffhangers from the finale. It’s a new semester at the Korean Independent School of Seoul (K.I.S.S. for short) and while there are a few new faces in Season 2, one *familiar* face is Juliana, played by Regan Aliyah. Aliyah briefly appeared in XO, Kitty’s first season as the secret girlfriend of self-proclaimed Queen Bee Yuri Han (Gia Kim). However, her role is more prominent in Season 2 as she returns to K.I.S.S. and finally goes public with her relationship with Yuri, and, she tells Her Campus, she’s thrilled for viewers to see how her storyline evolves. Spoiler Warning: Spoilers for XO, Kitty Season 2 follow.
“I like to say it’s the first time all these kids are dealing with a lot of issues. They’re teenagers — they’ve never done a lot of things before,” Aliyah says in an exclusive interview. “These are their first relationships, first fights, and first [time] navigating [it all]. Getting to see Juliana in those firsts, and within the friend group, is going to be really cool for other people to experience as well.”
While Juliana and Yuri’s relationship seems promising at the beginning of the season, their hot romance becomes troubled by all-too-real feelings of uncertainty, doubt, and betrayal due to the latter’s connection with Kitty (Anna Cathcart). “When you’re young, everything feels like the end of the world,” Aliyah says. “Every emotion you have feels heightened to the extreme, including little insecurities that you haven’t addressed in yourself because you’re a child.”
While Juliana and Yuri try to keep their romance in a good place, things ultimately don’t work out for them near the end of the season after it’s revealed to the friend group that Kitty and Yuri kissed. “[Juliana’s] intuition was a little bit right with certain things, but she didn’t act on it in the best way,” Aliyah says.
If she could give any relationship advice to her high school-aged character, 25-year-old Aliyah would encourage her to keep following her gut but try a more mature approach to handling her concerns. “If you have intuitions about something, you need to have an honest conversation with the person you’re with, but you also need to trust the person that you’re with,” she says. “If something happens and it’s not your ideal outcome, then you deal with it. You cannot project your own feelings onto anybody else.”
So, does this officially mark the end of Juliana and Yuri? Not necessarily. Although Juliana begins dating Praveena, Kitty’s former fling, in the middle of Season 2, there’s no telling what the future holds for Yuri and her babe. “It’s important to note that [Juliana’s] talking to Praveena, yet as soon as she sees Yuri feeling some type of way, her whole body and energy shifts and she still wants to make sure this person is OK,” Aliyah says of Juliana and Yuri’s post-breakup moment in Episode 5. “Regardless of where the story goes, she’s always going to care for her and make sure she’s OK. Overall, it shows a level of Juliana understanding at the very end that mistakes can happen and she doesn’t hold it against [Yuri]. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We can only hope that the best thing happens for every character, but she’ll always have love and care for Yuri.”
And who knows, maybe Juliana and Yuri will rekindle their relationship if the show gets a third season. (Fingers crossed.) But if they’re not meant to be, Aliyah hopes potential future episodes will show Juliana fully tapping into her identity. “I would love to see her leaning into this androgynous energy physically. But I really want whatever she wants, whatever makes her happy,” she says. “Whether that’s being with herself, being with somebody new, going back and righting their wrongs of that situation. Whatever’s best.”