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Luke Carberry is an American actor and a graduate of the Western Academy of Beijing. Born in the USA in 1996, he moved to Beijing with his family in 2001 at age five to study Mandarin Chinese. He attended the Western Academy of Beijing (WAB) from Grade 1 in 2002 until his graduation in 2014 at age 18. His mother is Ellen Carberry, and he has a younger sister named Chloe.
What Luke has most appreciated about WAB is the passion for learning it instilled in him. He enjoyed all his teachers because their enthusiasm was contagious. Many of his classmates were hardworking and respectful, which made working and being around them enjoyable. He formed lasting friendships at WAB that he values deeply.
Surprisingly, one of his proudest achievements is that during the two years of the IB Diploma (DP), he never stayed up past 11:30 pm on school nights and still earned excellent grades. He served as leader of the Student Ambassadors, played sports year-round, and managed his time well enough to get sufficient sleep.
Luke enrolled in the IB DP in high school and found it less challenging than many claimed. He maintained strong study habits, took thorough notes, planned his homework schedule carefully, and worked efficiently. His focus was on truly understanding the material rather than just memorizing. He sought to grasp why processes occurred, not just how, and learned to apply concepts to different situations.
He loved the international school education, believing it to be more rigorous and relevant than a typical high school curriculum. He highly recommends the IB DP, as he feels it prepares students well for college and professional life. Success in IB requires mastering effective study and work skills, critical thinking, and strong writing abilities.
At age 14, after completing Grade 9, Dutch-Norwegian director Harald Zwart offered Luke a small role in the movie The Karate Kid. Excited by the opportunity, Luke applied and looked forward to acting alongside Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan, despite having no prior film experience.
Filming took place from July to October 2009, during summer vacation so that students could avoid missing school, with some real students also participating. Although shooting extended into early October, Luke was unbothered; he brought his homework, notes, and books to the set and kept up with assignments and tests. His teachers emailed him work, and he completed his Chinese homework effectively. On three occasions, he was out of school for two or three consecutive days. Thanks to WAB’s support, he managed his math and Chinese assignments on a computer and reintegrated smoothly with his classmates after filming.
Luke experienced the full Hollywood treatment when he walked the red carpet at the world premiere of The Karate Kid at Fox Westwood Village in Los Angeles. “It was my first time in LA, and we stayed near Venice Beach, which was very cool,” Luke recalls. “They sent a driver in a luxury SUV to pick us up and take us to the red carpet. There were many cameras and reporters asking questions like, ‘What was it like to work with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan?’” The Carberry family was amazed to see Luke and Chloe appear prominently on the big screen. “It’s a cliché, but it was unbelievable,” he says.
Ellen Carberry remembers watching the film for the first time. “No one had seen it before that moment. Early in the movie, the main characters arrive in Beijing by taxi, pulling up in front of their apartment. A blond boy comes over to help with the luggage—and suddenly, I realized, ‘Oh my God! It’s Luke!’ A few minutes later, there he was on the screen, larger than life, and we were stunned. Chloe also appeared as an extra in the school cafeteria, showing up several times. Seeing them both on screen was incredible.”
“One of the best outcomes of the movie is how it captured Beijing at a specific point in time,” Ellen adds. “Will Smith’s film showed some of the changes happening in Beijing: that a Black American family would move there and that there would be a school blending Western and Chinese families. It’s actually more sophisticated than we expected. For Luke, his peers, and all our friends and family, that part of their lives is forever preserved in the film. It serves as a lasting keepsake of what life was like for them in Beijing.”
