Anna Cathcart and Sang Heon Lee Talk “XO, Kitty” Season 3, Love, Chaos, and Breaking Points

This article contains spoilers for XO, Kitty Season 3. Some quotes in this interview were edited for clarity.

Netflix young adult series, XO, Kitty returned to our screens with Season 3 on April 2, picking up with Kitty Song-Covey (Anna Cathcart) and Minho Moon (Sang Heon Lee) finally stepping into a real relationship. Though, it doesn’t take long for things to get complicated. What started as a long-distance situationship quickly unraveled into miscommunication, jealousy, and the kind of messiness that comes with having something to lose.

A week before the premiere, Cathcart and Lee joined EnVi on Zoom during a press junket to break down that arc. In our spoiler-filled conversation, the actors unpacked the highs of bringing Kitty and Minho together, the weight of the seasons fifth episode’s breaking point, and how leaning into uncertainty shaped both their characters and this chapter of XO, Kitty. 

Playing the Rom-Com Highs

As with any season of XO, Kitty, this one is packed with big rom-com moments. It opens with Kitty and Minho on a cable car ride, then moves through first kisses, Senior Sunrise, and cute dates. It all leads to a finale with the two boarding a plane to Portland, Oregon, Kitty’s hometown.

Cathcart’s personal favorite leans fully into K‑drama fantasy at Lotte World, a major theme park in Seoul and a staple date spot. In that episode, Kitty and her classmates head there on a class trip so Kitty and Yuri can recreate a photo of their mothers on the French Revolution coaster. 

“It felt very like young love on a cute day; getting to hold hands and walk everywhere and be so excited and live in the butterflies of all of it,” Cathcart said.

What really stuck with her is how the episode shows Minho quietly showing up for Kitty.

“I feel like that episode really locked that in and it was a very sweet storyline of having Minho be like ‘I’m gonna be here for you’ and ‘Let’s work up to your fear of this rollercoaster’ and ‘We’re in it together,’” Cathcart continued. 

Lee, on the other hand, is drawn to romance when it’s a little messier and a lot more public. His favorite pick is the subway scene, where Minho chases after Kitty before she boards her flight at the end of the semester. 

“I don’t know why it’s so romantic when something happens like that in a public space,” Lee said. “When you’re so open, when you’re out there, and when there are public people just watching you, that’s the moment when you don’t really care who’s there and what’s going on around you. You just focused on that one person right in front of you.”

Episode 5: The Breaking Point

In Episode 5, Kitty wakes up from a jealousy-fueled nightmare, misreads a positive pregnancy test in the bathroom, and convinces herself that Minho lied about his summer and got their friend Eunice pregnant. When she confronts him, she doesn’t give him a chance to explain. After learning she was wrong, she follows him back to his dorm to apologize but Minho has already hit his limit.

“It’s not that you don’t trust me, it’s that you’ve never trusted me,” he told Kitty, before ending the relationship.

As the relationship moved into real conflict, Cathcart and Lee had to adjust how they approached their scenes together. “It was definitely new, I feel like, for us as actors on this show and as characters, we’ve never really been this vulnerable with each other and having this much conflict,” Cathcart said. “I think we’ve never really brought it to this level of stakes with our two characters.”

For the dorm-room breakup in particular, they barely spoke, kept their headphones in, and avoided even looking at each other between takes so they could “enter this as our characters and really get into their feelings,” Cathcart said.

“We were very locked in and very stressed in the way of like, we wanted it to be special and important and we wanted it to translate,” Cathcart explained. “And I feel like it was one of the only scenes that we didn’t really talk to each other in between takes.”

Lee leaned into the scene with the same mindset, wanting the confrontation between Kitty and Minho to feel delicate and a little unpredictable, rather than over-rehearsed. He recalled trying to “set the tone right” before each take and protect the scene’s fragility. 

The episode also changed how they saw Kitty and Minho as people. For Cathcart, the big accusation and breakup showed Kitty as someone genuinely shaken by how much she cares.

“Kitty’s just never been this doubtful and insecure before,” she said. “We’ve never seen her so unsure. And I think Minho is just at his breaking point. He has done a lot, and he believes he’s done everything in his power to show Kitty how he feels and be there for her, but she can’t help but still feel insecure. I think that can be really tough in a relationship, and very common, to be honest.”

“When someone’s really scared to lose someone, it’s easy to become doubtful, it’s easy to overthink. I think Kitty’s never felt this scared before in love, and that’s a weird concept for her to deal with, because I feel like she normally would associate it with just bliss and happiness and closeness, Cathcart added. “She’s never felt this sense of fear with it, and I think it’s because she has such strong feelings for him that she develops this anxiety around losing him, and that can also translate into not being the most supportive partner.”

At the same time, she understood Minho’s reaction to Kitty’s accusation. “I totally did feel for Minho and understood where he was coming from with his frustration, that she believed the worst in him and she didn’t trust him in a crazy time like this,” Cathcart said.

Lee shared that Episode 5 is when Minho fully clocks both Kitty’s “chaos” and his own limit. Minho knows she’s a “chaos queen” who likes to get involved and wants to help people, which he sees as one of her best qualities. But with Minho juggling work, his relationship, and everything else, it leaves him unsure who he can really lean on.

“If the one person that he could rely on doesn’t feel like her being on his side, then that’s when he probably felt [that] maybe this is not the right time,” Lee said.

By the end of the season, though, Lee believed, “Minho has a better understanding of Kitty now, because, at the end of the day, he realizes she comes from a good heart and she meant the best for him, not in the mean way. You know, I’m glad he came to that realization.”

The accusation about Eunice was the moment Kitty’s fear of losing Minho collided with his exhaustion of not being trusted. It’s become their most adult fight yet, and made their love story less picture-perfect and way more real.

MoonCovey’s Growing Pains

By the end of the season, Kitty and Minho aren’t riding off into a perfectly mapped-out future. The show leaves them on a plane heading to Portland, holding hands while not totally sure what comes next.

“I think a big takeaway from the season in general, that also applies to the two of them as a couple, is just embracing the unknown and knowing that you don’t know what’s going to happen next, you don’t know how something’s going to end,” Cathcart said.

Kitty spent most of the season trying to control every variable: her relationship, friendships, and future. By the finale, Cathcart said there’s a quiet but important change in how Kitty shows up as a partner. Instead of needing to define or secure everything, she starts to accept that being fully in the moment with Minho can be enough.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen next month, next year,” Cathcart said. “But right now, you know that you really like this person. They mean a lot to you, and it’s the same both ways. That’s enough sometimes to just end the questions there and enjoy it and sit in this moment with each other.”

“And that’s definitely how they’re feeling on the airplane, at least in my perspective,” she continued. “… right now, they’re so happy and blissful to just be holding hands and beside one another, and that’s enough.”

Lee echoed that idea, adding that not knowing everything can actually be a good thing. 

“Being uncertain doesn’t always [have to be] such a vulnerable thing or something scary,” he said. “If you know everything about what’s going to happen throughout your future, then what is there to look forward to? … The unexpected makes it more exciting, and it’s like, also, a life lesson, right? Because you just have to learn that not everything is going to turn out the way how you expect it to be, but that is also sort of a path for you to go.”

After a season of overthinking and second‑guessing, the show ends with Kitty and Minho doing neither. They’re not sure what’s next, but they’re clear on who they want next to them.

From Kitty’s List to Their Own

In this season, Kitty decides to create her own “Senior Sunset List,” a checklist of everything she wants to do before the end of her senior year. Cathcart admitted she’s just as list-obsessed as Kitty, keeping “goals lists and dreams lists” for both career and life.

At the top of her own sunset list is a big trip with her sister, while their schedules are still flexible and the future feels wide open. She also has a long-standing mission to convince her parents to get a dog. She kept her last goal intentionally broad: to hit another career milestone. 

Lee’s list is more succinct: he wants to travel to countries he hasn’t visited yet and put on a small exhibition of the drawings he’s been collecting in his black notebook, ideally before the year ends or the weather gets too cold. 

Unlike Kitty and Cathcart, Lee doesn’t love the pressure of a checklist. As he puts it, he’s not “much of a list guy,” and prefers a “no plan is a plan” approach so he doesn’t feel boxed in by what he did and didn’t cross off. 

Lee and Cathcart’s own plans are simple with nothing mapped out in detail, but they know the general direction they want to move in. The future isn’t set in stone, but Season 3 shows that sometimes the uncertainty is part of the fun.

XO, Kitty Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.

Want more XO, Kitty? Read our First Impression of Season 3!