Agnez Mo is making a major acting comeback in the fourth season of Prime Video’s “Reacher,” playing Lila Hoth, an Indonesian woman who travels to Philadelphia with her mother in search of her biological father. For Mo, best known internationally for her music career — she’s a former child star who became one of Indonesia’s most prominent pop singers with over 190 awards, including four MTV Indonesia awards — this marks her first major role in an American production and her first significant acting work in more than a decade, following earlier appearances in the Taiwanese drama “The Hospital” and several Indonesian television shows.
To prepare for the role, Mo underwent an intensive three-week process working with two acting coaches: John, who flew from New York to Los Angeles specifically for the job, and Jamie Aline. Beyond the technical coaching, she also sat down with the show’s creator to work through Lila’s backstory and character arc in depth, describing the character as emotionally “layered” and saying that for the three episodes she appeared in, she fully became Lila rather than playing herself.
What sets Mo’s involvement apart is how she pushed to weave elements of Indonesian culture into the character’s action sequences rather than treating them as generic fight choreography. One standout moment features pencak silat, the traditional Indonesian martial art, worked into a fight scene, while the karambit — a traditional curved Indonesian blade — appears as Lila’s weapon of choice during a confrontation with several antagonists. According to other reports, the karambit is specifically tied to Minangkabau martial tradition from West Sumatra, and Mo reportedly carried a replica of the weapon in her bag so she could keep practicing with it during downtime while filming in Toronto.
Mo’s contribution went beyond her own performance, too — she stepped into an informal mentoring role for other actors cast as Indonesian characters, helping them with Indonesian dialogue delivery and coaching them on how to handle the karambit and execute basic pencak silat movements. The role also reunites her on-screen with fellow Indonesian artist Anggun C. Sasmi, who plays her mother, Amisha Hoth — together their appearance has drawn attention as a rare instance of Indonesian martial arts and culture reaching a mainstream Hollywood action series.
