Miku Martineau commands the screen and boat in new lead role in Crew Girl

Created by showrunner Vivian Lin, Crew Girl follows 16-year-old Teagan Tao, played by Miku Martineau, a competitive rower whose life is turned upside down by a family scandal. Starting over at the elite Easton Prep, she finds herself at a school that has only recently become co-ed, and without a girls’ rowing team.

Her way back onto the water is to become coxswain of the boys’ varsity crew.

For Lin, Teagan’s story began less with her identity and more with a question about leadership.

“I knew I wanted to explore the idea of a superstar rower figuring out how to become a leader,” Lin told Cold Tea Collective.

Unpacking complex relationships in Crew Girl

Teagan has spent much of her life succeeding as an individual athlete. At Easton, that mentality suddenly isn’t enough. She has to figure out how to become part of a team while simultaneously convincing that team to follow her.

Lin jokingly compared Teagan to the person we’ve probably all been at least once: the exasperated member of a group project wondering why no one else is doing the work.

“How do I make them do the work? Do they want to do the work? They’re fighting with each other all the time. How do I even get them to listen to me?” Lin said.

It’s a surprisingly accurate description of Teagan. She’s capable and knows it. But Crew Girl doesn’t confuse competence with perfection.

That was important to Lin.

“People are complicated. People aren’t always smart. People make mistakes,” she said. “People go on their impulses.”

That means Teagan is allowed to make the wrong decision. She can break rules for good reasons, or bad ones. She can kiss the wrong person. Lin was less concerned with whether audiences would always find Teagan likeable than whether the decisions she made felt true to who she was in that moment.

“We are messy,” Lin said. “We are messy people.”

As someone watching, that messiness is exactly what made me want to keep following Teagan.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the importance of “strong female characters,” but strength can become its own box. A woman can be fearless, independent and competent, but somehow still needs to make all the right choices to remain worthy of rooting for.

Teagan doesn’t. And Lin had another way of thinking about her strength.

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Miku Martineau’s “Teagan Tao” expands badass female lead role 

While developing Teagan, Lin found herself moving away from one word commonly used to describe women like her: “badass.”

“I wanted her to be a badass leader,” Lin explained. “And sometimes when you say that word, it can become really restrictive and it almost dictates the personality.”

Instead, Lin began thinking about the Chinese word lìhai, which she describes as intensely capable or formidable.

Unlike “badass,” lìhai gave Lin room to imagine Teagan’s strength without dictating what that strength had to look like.

Teagan can be competitive, ambitious and capable of corralling a boat full of teenage boys. But she can also be “very gentle, very caring, very empathetic” and soft.

“I didn’t want to lose those when I was trying to imagine her,” Lin said.

That distinction stayed with me.

Teagan doesn’t have to prove she’s strong by becoming less soft.

It’s also an interesting example of how culture can shape a character even when it isn’t explicitly being explained on screen. Lin is Chinese and Taiwanese, while Teagan is half Japanese and half white. Lìhai isn’t presented as part of Teagan’s cultural identity within the series. Instead, it was part of the cultural framework Lin herself brought into the writing.

As Lin put it, cultural identity doesn’t necessarily influence every mundane thing a person does.

“I’m not Chinese in everything I do,” she said.

Instead, those influences came in and out of Teagan’s story where they felt organic.

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Crew Girl is letting its Asian female lead simply be a girl

There can sometimes be a pressure for characters from underrepresented communities to explain their identities to audiences.

Crew Girl largely resists that.

When I asked Lin about the decision to let Teagan exist as an Asian lead without making her ethnicity the central conflict, her response was refreshingly simple.

“She’s a teenage girl who’s a rower.”

The series explores Teagan’s Asian identity where it makes sense, Lin explained, without requiring it to drive her entire storyline.

“She just lives her life. She just thrives.”

There’s something about that simplicity that feels meaningful to me.

As an Asian woman, I’m still not used to seeing women who look like me at the centre of mainstream North American stories. Even less common is seeing them there without their Asianness needing to become the primary reason for the story.

That doesn’t mean I want stories about Asian identity to disappear. Far from it. Stories about our families, cultures, immigration, belonging and the sometimes complicated experience of growing up between worlds remain important.

But Asian characters deserve access to all the other stories, too. We should get to fall in love. Play sports. Make terrible decisions. Be funny. Be selfish. Lead. Fail. Start over.And sometimes our identity can simply exist alongside all of that.

Martineau, who is Japanese Canadian, brought her own perspective to Teagan even when it wasn’t explicitly written into the script: “I think subconsciously we bring parts of ourselves to the character without even trying,” Martineau told Cold Tea Collective.

For her, that included qualities she associates with her Japanese identity and family.

“My mom and my grandmother and all of my family in Japan have an insane amount of determination and positivity and resilience,” she said. “I think those qualities definitely belong in Teagan as well.”

Martineau also reflected on growing up as an Asian woman in a predominantly white neighbourhood and remembering how strongly she once wanted to fit in.

“As you get older, I think we realize the things that make us unique and individualistic and different can actually be our greatest strengths,” she said.

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Learning how to command the boat

Teagan’s journey is also happening in a world that wasn’t exactly designed with her in mind.

Easton has only recently become co-ed, and the rowing program is still an established boys’ space. Teagan doesn’t simply enter it. As coxswain, she eventually has to lead within it.

She is responsible for directing the boat and getting a group of boys with very different personalities to work together.

“Some guys don’t want to listen to women. Step one,” Lin said.

But Crew Girl doesn’t make every relationship Teagan has with the boys antagonistic. Lin wanted to explore different dynamics between Teagan and each member of the boat, including resistance, friendship, support and, of course, romance.

For Martineau, that made becoming a coxswain an interesting shift to play.

“You’re not only joining the team, but you’re becoming the leader of a team,” she said. “You have to be a great communicator, you have to earn respect.”

That leadership starts to affect the boys around her, too.

For Cam, played by Kyle Clark, Teagan’s arrival means there is suddenly someone else at Easton who understands what it feels like to be an outsider.

“I think he’s able to learn through her actions and how she chooses to lead the team how he might be able to do that in the future,” Clark said.

Josh, played by Sam Braun, encounters someone who isn’t particularly interested in indulging him.

“Teagan will stand her ground,” Braun said. “She’s not gonna put up with any of Josh’s kind of BS.”

It’s what makes rowing such a fitting setting for Teagan’s story.

Lin describes the sport as intensely competitive and precise, but unlike sports where a superstar player can compensate for a weaker team, a rowing crew depends on everyone moving together.

“One person can ruin the whole race,” Lin said. “You can’t have a superstar and compensate for everyone. Everyone has to be at the same level. You have to all pull together.”

For someone who begins the series accustomed to being the superstar, Teagan has to learn that being the best person in the boat isn’t the same thing as being able to lead it.

Miku Martineau embodies main character energy as “Teagan Tao” in Vivian Lin’s Crew Girl

There is still a part of me that takes notice when an Asian woman is at the centre of the screen.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up seeing it often. And when we did get characters who looked like us, their cultural identity was often part of the explanation for why they were there. Their family, their heritage, the tension between cultures. These were often the stories we were allowed to tell.

There is value in those stories. I see pieces of myself in them, too. But watching Netflix’s Crew Girl, I was struck by something much simpler: Teagan Tao gets to just be a teenage girl.

She’s a competitive athlete. She’s ambitious and stubborn. She makes questionable decisions, falls for people she probably shouldn’t and sometimes thinks she knows better than everyone around her. She also happens to be half Japanese.

Her Asian identity matters. It just doesn’t have to explain who she is.her.

And for me, that’s part of what makes seeing someone like Teagan at the centre of a glossy teen drama feel significant.

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Representation can also mean getting to be messy

For a long time, simply seeing Asian faces on screen felt like a milestone.

In many ways, it still does.

But watching Crew Girl made me think about what we get to ask for after visibility.

I want Asian women to have stories explicitly about our cultures and identities. I also want us to have stories where we’re allowed to exist beyond them. I want characters who are specific, complicated and occasionally unlikeable without carrying the responsibility of representing an entire community.

Teagan gets to be formidable and soft. She gets to be a leader who doesn’t always know what she’s doing. She gets to stand her ground, fall in love, make mistakes and figure out who she wants to become.

She doesn’t have to be a “perfect” representation.

She doesn’t have to represent every Asian girl watching Crew Girl.

She gets to be one.

Crew Girl premieres September 10 on Netflix.

Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.