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The actor discusses Hollywood survival skills, winning the lottery, and her interest in telling “messy” Asian American stories.
Sandra Oh wanted to talk to me, first, about the Monterey Park shooting. The attack had taken place a week earlier, not far from her home in Los Angeles. She was still working through her feelings about it. Seeing her face fill my laptop screen over Zoom, I thought about her ability as an actor to externalize emotion with the camera up close. For our interview, Oh had set up her computer in her back yard. A fire pit, with cushions and an L-shaped seating area, was behind her. As she discussed the shooting, Oh stared at a point off to her right; her eyebrows sloped upward, and her brow furrowed. She radiated dismay.
After we discussed the tragedy for a few minutes, she asked if she could start recording the conversation. She wanted to keep a copy of it for herself. Perhaps it was her age, she told me––fifty-one years old. She had been feeling the urge to gather her thoughts and “put them all together one day.” (She told me that she’s kept journals going back to the fifth grade.) She’d been dwelling on the shooting, turning over its meaning in her head––particularly the fact that the perpetrator turned out to be an Asian immigrant himself. The reflection is, in some ways, part of her work. Last October, during a panel I moderated at The New Yorker Festival, on “identity and craft,” Oh said that in the past the characters she played hadn’t “necessarily had their history, their family, their race, their culture explored.” Now, she added, her overriding interest was in “telling Asian American stories.”
Oh is still revered by fans for her decade-long stint as Cristina Yang, the unapologetically ambitious cardiothoracic surgeon and devoted best friend on “Grey’s Anatomy.” More recently, her portrayal of the world-weary British intelligence agent Eve Polastri, in BBC America’s breakout hit “Killing Eve,” earned her a raft of awards and critical plaudits. It was during the pandemic, however, as violence against Asians surged, that Oh’s artistic choices seemed to coalesce into a sense of purpose. She was at her farcical best as Ji-Yoon Kim, the pathbreaking English-department chair at Pembroke University, in the Netflix series “The Chair,” released in 2021. Last summer, she began production of an original Hulu comedy movie with the comedian and actress Nora Lum, otherwise known as Awkwafina. Oh is now filming a miniseries adaptation of “The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s tragicomic novel on the Vietnamese refugee experience, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. The project is slated for HBO, and one of its creative visionaries is the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook.
In March, 2021, Oh was in the middle of production of “The Chair,” in Pennsylvania, when a white man went on a shooting rampage in Georgia, killing eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent. Afterward, Oh made an unexpected appearance at a “Stop Asian Hate” rally in Pittsburgh. She took the megaphone and delivered a rousing speech that culminated with her asking the crowd to join her in repeating a mantra, which could have been a credo for her Hollywood career. “I am proud to be Asian,” she said, thrusting her hand high, and then pointing it at the ground in front of her. “I belong here.”
In the span of more than two hours on a Friday last month, she spoke about identity, opportunity, winning the lottery, and why she’s no longer waiting for the “white dudes” of the industry to call.
The masquerade ball with Gortash we all deserved!!
(they're probably gossiping about the nobles...)
gorgeous Enver Gortash x Durge Juria comm from yec_yourz ♡
ive not seen enough people going absolutely batshit bananas over how beautiful gorgeous stunning pretty lovely did i mention BEAUTIFUL Maddie Buckley looks in that dress??????
"I've got nothing. I really tried as well. I mean, even on the walk over here, I was thinking something would pop into my head, but nope. Absolutely nothing. Sorry, Ted."