The New Yorker Interview
Sandra Oh’s Sense of Purpose
The actor discusses Hollywood survival skills, winning the lottery, and her interest in telling “messy” Asian American stories.
By February 15, 2023
Photograph by Ryan Pfluger for The New Yorker
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.
Monterey Park is not far from where you live.
No, not at all.
What was your first reaction when you heard about the shooting? Did you think, This must be an anti-Asian attack?
I think everyone does. I’m not thinking of that out of the blue. It’s because we’ve seen these attacks again and again. But I think it’s, like, you want to hold, trying to figure out what it is until you get more information. You can’t rush to one thing or another. I feel like we are moving as a society to deepen the conversation of what that means, who is the perpetrator. And that the ways that we understand these horrific things are now shifting. We have to not rush into a fixed understanding.
How did you then feel when you found out the shooter was an older Asian man? There was also the shooting in Half Moon Bay, committed by an older Asian man. And, last year, another at a Taiwanese church in Orange County. What do you make of these cases involving Asian elders as perpetrators?
Mental health, even as a word—to translate what that means to our parents and our grandparents in the way that you and I, in our midlife of having grown up here, understand it, is really hard. Moving into a little bit about “The Sympathizer,” there are communities upon communities who are not that far away from the initial trauma. Like, my parents came over after going through an occupation and two wars, and then you come over to a place where there’s no language. There’s racism, classism, and all that stuff, and you have to make it with two hundred bucks.
There’s not a lot of understanding of mental health in the Asian immigrant community, right?
And there’s clearly trauma. A lot of our parents have come out of war, and even being able to bring that up—it’s, like, you are not going to share your laundry. The American version of wellness, or a Western version of wellness—I don’t think really translates in older generations.
Are there other thoughts about the shooting that you’re processing at this point?
I dig deeper into my work. I try and dig deeper into cleaning my own house. It’s a long game, where hopefully—you don’t know how, and you’ll never know—your effort for understanding in truthfulness and interpretation of the character or story might infiltrate someone and add to their own understanding. Again, I’m going to go to the piece that I’m working on right now: “The Sympathizer” has a [nearly] all-Vietnamese cast, Vietnamese American and Vietnamese Vietnamese—from the younger generation to the older. I’ve never been so clear on how to lend real support. It’s amazing to be able to be a part of a piece that is choosing to tell a very complicated story within the Vietnamese American community here in L.A. But what it does for the players inside of it, to be embodying their parents or reliving an extremely traumatic, very difficult part of their lives, is profoundly interesting. And I’m really happy that it’s happening. Sitting on set with the rest of my castmates and hearing them just tell stories—all this stuff is coming out, just their personal experiences, hilarious stuff, crazy stuff. And I’m just, like, Oh, my God, this is just like a geyser of community, a geyser of story, a geyser of pain, a geyser of richness that hopefully we’re capturing. So my point, going back to me, is, when shit like this happens, I’m going to try and get right, so I can show up for other people who are doing more heavy lifting.
How did you first get involved in the project?
What I’m so pleased with is that it was Viet [Thanh Nguyen]’s choice. Don McKellar, who’s a co-showrunner with Park [Chan-wook], and Niv Fichman, who is [a] producer—they’re both Canadian. This is my fifth project with both of them. When they got the book and the meeting with Viet, Viet goes, “I would like it to be Sandra.” And then Don was, like, “Ooh, I’m probably going to be able to make that happen.”
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Tell me about the character you play, Sofia Mori. She’s a middle-aged Japanese American secretary who becomes the love interest of the captain, the main character.
The thing with Ms. Mori is that she represents the Asian American, born-and-raised American. She should be slightly different from the immigrant Vietnamese community, which is what the piece is about. So her sense of liberation, her sense of sexuality, should be and is outstanding within that. I think in some ways that is the purpose, and her willingness and outsiderness to try and see the captain, who was a spy, and never wants to be seen, and is unknown to himself—she is the one who really does see him.
Actually, I didn’t remember what generation Ms. Mori is in the book.
She is nisei.
So that means she was born here, second-generation.
Yes, I absolutely play her in this way. There’s this moment, I’m talking with Director Park, and I’m standing with his translator and his assistant, and I have to explain code-switching to him. You track where she is as a nisei, as in, like, second- or third-generation Asian American who has gone through the sixties. You’re going to track where she is by how she speaks to the professor, the white man, versus how she speaks to people at the Vietnamese longevity party. What I try to do is to really see that she’s also trapped in her own code-switching. I actually wanted my outfit [at the longevity party] to be slightly risqué, so I asked for it to not have sleeves, because I felt that she would want to also be signalling in a group that, like, by the way, “I’m from here.” There’s a certain boldness that I wanted to play with Sofia, that she is absolutely, consciously signalling her outsideness of the immigrant Asian community, but also how she plays an inside-ness of a white community.
Tell me about working with Park Chan-wook. He speaks English, right? But he uses a translator?
Yes. That dude totally knows English.
I was curious about how you communicate with him, because I’m not sure how well you speak Korean.
Not, not at all. When he’s on set, he has two people beside him all the time, his assistant and his translator. When he’s talking to you, he’s speaking to you in Korean. I absolutely understand a bunch of what he’s saying. Honestly, it’s what I love about the relationship with the director, is you want to start having this kind of almost telepathic, quick shorthand, like you know what they want, or you know when you didn’t get it. Even with the formality of him speaking to me, it really, really worked for me, and I think it worked for a lot of people on set, because it creates a certain amount of space for you to lean into his vision. He is a very kind and elegant director. People are turning toward their best selves when he’s on set, because his expectation is of such an elevated place that you just want to follow.
You seem to really have a clear sense of purpose right now, in terms of the roles you choose and the directors and showrunners you work with. Am I right in that? How would you articulate that purpose?
That’s tough. The first part is easy. Yes, I would say, now, at this part of my life, there is a sense of purpose that I can absolutely feel, a framework to move forward with. And that framework includes having had all the experience that I’ve had, and, at this point, the level of power that I have had, to be able to make choices to actually manifest that purpose. Now your harder question: if I could articulate that purpose. My job is about kind of moving into a feeling, or a mysterious non-word place. I mean, my job is to embody thoughts and words and actions. That’s my job. Let me do a movement interpretation.
I’d love to see the movement interpretation!
If you watched me in my deepest place of my work, to try and continue my purpose and to find my purpose, you would understand why I don’t have words. I think that when you are able to touch real, true purpose, which for me has a profound spiritual component, you start losing words. In some ways, hopefully, I don’t ever have to talk about it. You can just see it.
Maybe we can keep talking about the current projects you’re working on and what motivated you to choose them. You’re working on a sister comedy with Awkwafina, directed by Jessica Yu. What attracted you about that project?
It’s really fun and silly, and I love Nora so much. We had such a good time shooting it. I’m going to try and find a photograph. [Picks up her phone and starts tapping through it.] Maybe I shouldn’t show you a photograph, because you’re going to write about it. Someone snapped a photograph of me and Nora in our wardrobe, and it’s just really, really, really hilarious. It was written by Jen D’Angelo, and Nora and I play sisters who kind of go on a road trip to a game show.
“Jeopardy!”
No, it’s not “Jeopardy!” Jen D’Angelo—honestly, I hope she patented it—came up with her own quiz show. We have a lot of really amazing, great, funny people in it. And working with Jessica Yu. I remember watching the Academy Awards, seeing her win for her doc.
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A documentary short.
Yes, and she had the best line, which was, like, “This dress costs more than my film.” And I just remember thinking, Oh, my God, who is that? Award shows are their own tricky things, but sometimes things stick. It always stuck with me. Who is that lady?
When it came around to finding the right person, our writer Jen D’Angelo is white. She really is writing it from her own perspective as herself and being a sister. When it went to Nora and I, then it was just, like, “Fantastic, let’s put ourselves very much in it, and the Asian American experience in it.” I think Jess might be fifth-generation. Her family was here for a long time. We all gathered in London and workshopped the script and just sat around telling stories. Eventually, that was the material that Jen brought back into the script. My character is so unaware and so insulting and self-serving in the best of comedy ways. I really wanted to stack it with some good Asian jokes. It just feels like now I’m ready to push it. It’s O.K. if people are mad at me for a bit. I’m ready for it to not have to look nice, to not have to have a good story, and not have a happy ending or anything like that. Our mom has a terrible gambling problem, so it was, like, “Yes, in the wheelhouse.”
There are certain details we wanted to put in that we knew that we wanted to push it. I know that I was very much ready. This is a celebration, because it’s a fucking funny movie.
When you say “push it,” what do you mean?
I know the absolutely, deeply important place that, let’s say, “The Joy Luck Club” had for us. And “Crazy Rich Asians” had for us. Those are two huge films, where there’s a certain type of interpretation of our community that is not exploring necessarily, well, broad comedy and messiness.
So, you’re saying that this is messy in a way that those two movies were not?
Yes. It’s very messy.
We should also talk about “Turning Red,” the Pixar movie from last year, in which you play the overprotective mother of the main character, Meilin. Congratulations on the Oscar nomination for the film, by the way. And that’s also with an Asian female director, Domee Shi. Why this project?
I start with the fact that it’s amazing that there is opportunity. By the time “Turning Red” came to me, in 2020, they had already been working on it for, like, three or four years. So these are the opportunities that have been long fought for. I mean, I wanted that part so badly, mostly because it was set in Toronto. It’s a love letter to Toronto. I related quite deeply to the character of Meilin, the daughter, who really needs to embrace her inner panda. Inhabiting the character of Ming was just a beautiful acting opportunity.
Millennials now are making their films, and it’s going to be about existential stuff. Who am I? Where is God? What is my purpose in life? Those very, very, very basic human storytelling elements—now we have the generation. And I’m so happy to be able to fulfill whatever vision and whatever thing that they’re trying to work out and bring to the world. That just happens to be the timing, my timing in history right now, that there is someone with a long enough track record and with enough work that you can say, “Well, this person can take this on. Are you going to be able to entrust my interpretation of my mom in this person’s hands?” And I can say, “You can trust me that I would do it a billion per cent.”
Another film in which you play an Asian mother is “Umma,” which was about to start filming before the pandemic and then got interrupted. You finally started filming in late 2020. It’s a horror film, but there are some interesting things in it about abuse and Asian American heritage and rejection and acceptance.
Iris Shim, the writer-director, again, she’s another millennial female writer-director—that’s who I want to work with. That film and the script, it was really an examination of generational trauma, interpreted through a type of genre lens. What happens when you try to bury, escape, ignore your history and your trauma? It will come back to try and kill you as a form of a ghost of your mother. I really dug into exploring that kind of psychological process, of what it is to meet a dark force that is trying to kill you.
It makes me wonder about your own relationship with your Koreanness and how that’s waxed or waned in your life.
There are many of us in the first generation, right? I’d say a very large wave came in the sixties. That’s when my parents came.
Yes, when my parents came, too.
Those of us who did not grow up in a major city like L.A. or New York—I think many of us completely lost the language. It’s taken me a long time to figure this out, because now, talking to other people who maybe are in the forty-five to sixty-five range—if you did not grow up in a major hub, you do not have the language. And then it’s, like, what happens psychologically? Why did that need to happen? I am so glad that I’m alive to see the embrace and the celebration of Korean culture and how that has now infiltrated into Western culture. When you see my nieces, or kids who are in their teens, who are Korean, they’re not going to feel the complicated things that probably you and I may have.
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You’re speaking hypothetically. What are these complicated things for yourself?
I think for many, many, many of us, it’s like when you are the only one, it’s not conscious for a long time how your need of survival to fit in takes up the space for you to find your own identity. It’s a big, unconscious part of why I do what I do—why it was always such a fight, and also why I just persisted. I never gave up. You would not believe the shit that I have done in my early days. I have to make a living, right? But I kept at it because I just think that there’s something that I think I had to work out. Right now I’m just trying to figure out my thoughts around this. What are the things that one may put away or put the weight of Western white culture on top of?
What did you put away?
I don’t know. But I know whatever it was kept on wanting to come out.
I wonder if we could go back to the beginning and how you got your start in acting and show business.
I always just wanted to be a dancer. It’s such a pure form. I started when I was four, and then I started acting at about ten because I knew the dance was not going to happen.
I know you started out in the theatre, but I was curious what your TV- and movie-watching was like as a child.
We got, like, one American channel. This sounds like I lived up in the Northwest Territories.
You lived in Ottawa, right?
It wasn’t even Ottawa, dude. It was, like, a city suburb outside of Ottawa. I’d say the biggest influences for me were “The Carol Burnett Show” and “Fame.” When I think back to what those things sparked in me then, walking to and from school, how those shows stayed with me in some way and affected me. I think those two shows really did.
I have to ask you about the life you might have lived. You got a scholarship to study journalism that you passed up to study acting instead. What kind of journalism would you have done?
I was blessed enough to be able to have the space to be a passionate, ambitious young person. And so the environmental movement at that time meant a lot to me. Identifying as a young feminist really meant a lot to me. That was the feeling that I wanted to bring into journalism. But ultimately I wanted to be an actor. There’s a certain type of emotionality that I have, which is clearly a part of my fucking job. Do you know what I mean? It’s a skill set.
Going back to that question of purpose or internal compass, was there idealism in your interest in acting?
No. I’m taking this question as someone who is in their fifties, thinking about the person who I was at fourteen. I don’t think that I knew enough to protect myself, to not even dare to be idealistic about that, about a place for me in the filmmaking, entertainment landscape.
I’ve read some comments you’ve made in the past about Canada’s policy of multiculturalism that you benefitted from, when you were just getting your start in acting.
I have real strong thoughts on affirmative action, because I would not have gained the experience that I gained without “multiculturalism”—you can fucking call it whatever you want, but it’s making room for other people to get a shot. That happened for me in my teen years, where I’m cutting my teeth, understanding what it is to be in front of the camera, understanding what it is to hold a prop, to walk to your mark. These are the things that you need to learn. It’s not like I’m saying multiculturalism let me be the lead of anything. It’s not a be-all, end-all. But let’s say it’s a short film about our drinking and driving among the students. They can’t have all the students be white, because these were films that they would show in classrooms. And I know that I benefitted from this.
You had early success in Canada right out of theatre school. You landed lead roles in “The Diary of Evelyn Lau,” a television feature, and “Double Happiness,” a feature film.
I was just extremely lucky in my early career. I know the difference between luck and hard work. I was lucky.
Because those two films happened to be looking for someone in your exact demographic: Young, Asian, female?
Yes, yes. Again, these things need a lot of time. I’m not generating it. I’m just the right person to interpret it. But just what that did for me psychologically, and what that did for me creatively, set the tone for the rest of my career.
But then you moved to Los Angeles, and all that confidence left you, right?
Yes, then I came to L.A., and it was crushing.
How bad was it at first? It sounds like you were having trouble paying your bills, even eating?
I really didn’t have to eat much. I could survive on, like, a piece of pizza and a sweet potato. I really could, literally. But I won a lottery, and that saved me, and I was able to pay my rent.
You won a lottery?
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I did. I was living in a tiny apartment. I didn’t have rent. It was a bingo scratch-off. I won five thousand dollars. I bought two tickets, one for a friend, because it was his birthday, one for me. And I’m sure he’s really sorry that I didn’t give him the other one. These are the tiny things that you cobble together that can get you down to L.A.
I’ve also heard the story about your first meeting with an agent, and how she said that she already had an Asian actress on her roster and that she hadn’t auditioned in months. How exactly did she turn you away?
What was so insidious about what she said was that she was coming at it from doing me a favor, telling me the truth, basically saying, “Listen, no one’s going to tell you the truth, so I will. You should go back home and become famous there and then try.” She’s saying, “I’m going to tell you the truth. No one’s going to tell you the truth. You don’t belong here.” Right? It tapped into a very deep immigrant—and I would maybe even say East Asian immigrant—mentality, which is, What else do I have to do? I had already done a house theatre. I won an award for the television film. I won awards for the film-film. But, in some ways, she did tell me the truth. “You’re about to go into an industry where the majority of people think like I do. So don’t expect that it’s going to be the same for you as it has been for these white actresses.”
How long do you think it took for you to kind of get past that?
It’s not about getting past it. I mean, here I am talking to you about it almost thirty years later. What’s nice is it meant something to me then, and it means something different to me now. I really feel for the young person who received that.
You’ve said that when you first got the script for “Killing Eve,” you didn’t understand what part they were looking for you to play. It didn’t occur to you that they wanted you to be the lead.
Yes, that was so brutal. It’s, like, “I can’t even see myself.” How deep that comment from that agent was still living in me.
You’ve also talked about how in “Grey’s Anatomy,” when you played Cristina Yang, her race and her ethnicity were not really explored. How conscious of that were you at the time?
I would pitch jokes and story lines with my character and Sara Ramirez’s character because it’s, like, let’s get some color in it. It was just not the tone of the show at that time. There were little bits of it, like Tsai Chin came on as my mom, and Diahann Carroll came on as Isaiah Washington’s mom. And there were huge things you could do within the Black community and the Asian community, but those were just not story lines that the show was interested in pursuing. I knew it was just not the time to do it.
I’m so looking forward to the kids who are not going to understand what I’m talking about. You know, for me, it was, like, “Oh, my God, we got on the boat.” [Mimes holding the side of a boat, looking around wide-eyed.] “O.K., great. We got on the boat. Don’t rock it too much.” Right? I’m making light of it now, but that is true.
Did it feel constricting at the time? Because there’s an entire generation of young people who were also inspired by the show, and the diversity that they saw onscreen. There was progress in that . . .
There’s a lot of lightning in a bottle that happened on that show in the early years. The casting was remarkable. All you have to do is show up every week, and you’re going to see these people with our faces, doing jobs of authority and being in situations that you’re going to find fun to hang out with. So I don’t have a problem that it wasn’t the time. The same with, let’s say, something like “Killing Eve.” The show was about these two women and their obsession and them needing to kind of free themselves by somehow being with each other, or not being with each other. That’s really what it was. I’m more interested now [in roles that explore identity] because there’s opportunity—I don’t necessarily have to play only the cop or the investigative journalist whose backstory you don’t see.
I’ve heard you attribute the opportunities that are opening up now to “Crazy Rich Asians.”
Well, these are all pieces of a whole that we will never really be able to see until maybe twenty years down the line. I mean, everything is building on everything else. Tentpoles are easy to write about, because you can see monetarily in ways that I think this industry can understand. But in between are all those filmmakers and all those writers and all those executives and all those agents, right? It’s never one thing.
We have to talk about Michelle Yeoh and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Is that another tentpole?
Yes and no. Actually, I don’t know yet. It didn’t have the weight that those other two films had behind it, or the expectation. You know what I mean?
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Do you know Michelle personally?
Yes. When we were in London, she was in London shooting something, and Nora was there, and Nora obviously knows her from “Crazy Rich Asians.” We got together over dinner, and every so often we hang out.
Is there a kind of fraternity or sorority of Asian American actors?
I think it’s new for us. For someone like John Cho, or Daniel Dae Kim, or Ming-Na––people of my generation––I think we’ve all known each other for decades, but we’ve never really starred in anything together because it was just all so spread out. There was only one Asian person for, I don’t know, five hundred white people. Now we are gathering up enough creative power to choose to work with each other, and to open the doors for each other. Honestly, I didn't think I was ever going to experience that in my lifetime. And when we do get together? Oh, the food!
These young female Asian directors are the ones who are hiring you. It seems like the white male directors on feature films from major studios are still not calling, but your reaction now is: Who cares?
It’s like being able to get over a bad boyfriend. They’re not going to call. Just move on and hang out with the young women who want you to be their mom. If you’re going to put all your stock and wait for the white dude to give you the opportunity, or to give you the validation, or to say, “Now you can be who you are, because I say so”—that’s destructive. And I think that, well, patriarchy runs within all of us. And it takes a long time to just free yourself from that interior space. ♦
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