Afterward, Oh made an unexpected appearance at a “Stop Asian Hate” rally in Pittsburgh. 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. The project is slated for HBO, and one of its creative visionaries is the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook. 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. Last summer, she began production of an original Hulu comedy movie with the comedian and actress Nora Lum, otherwise known as Awkwafina. 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. It was during the pandemic, however, as violence against Asians surged, that Oh’s artistic choices seemed to coalesce into a sense of purpose. 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. 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.” The reflection is, in some ways, part of her work. 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. Perhaps it was her age, she told me––fifty-one years old. She wanted to keep a copy of it for herself. She radiated dismay.Īfter we discussed the tragedy for a few minutes, she asked if she could start recording the conversation. As she discussed the shooting, Oh stared at a point off to her right her eyebrows sloped upward, and her brow furrowed. A fire pit, with cushions and an L-shaped seating area, was behind her. For our interview, Oh had set up her computer in her back yard. 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. She was still working through her feelings about it. The attack had taken place a week earlier, not far from her home in Los Angeles. Sandra Oh wanted to talk to me, first, about the Monterey Park shooting.
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