Sandra Oh Is Agitating For Real, Culture-Changing Inclusion

8/27/2021 Sandra Oh Is Agitating for Real, Culture-Changing Inclusion
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Sandra Oh Is Agitating for Real, Culture-Changing

Inclusion
In Netflix's The Chair, Oh plays an academic struggling to modernize an unwieldy institution.
She's been bringing the same fight to Hollywood for decades.
_By
Gabrielle Bruney
Aug 17, 2021
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a37319316/sandra-oh-netflix-the-chair/?fbclid=IwAR1LyMx3wF07BrwDi09Uz159EVI7BYmyMEbWB8yyxtstSpZ… 1/15
THOMAS WHITESIDE / NETFLIX
“W
hen I opened that page and saw that her name is a Korean name,”
Sandra Oh tells me over Zoom, “It really righted something in
myself. I recognized it because the character was recognizing me. So
the way that I was able to meet the character was much more curious, much more
open.”
There’s a story Oh tells about realizing that she was being asked to play the initially
mild-mannered MI6 agent Eve Polastri, the lead character in Killing Eve. Even after
decades of acting, five Emmy nominations, and a Golden Globe win, she initially
couldn’t understand which role she was being offered in the gruesome and sexy BBC
psycho-drama. She’d played sidekicks and best friends, teachers and politicians. But
not since her early days in the Canadian film and television scene of the 1990s had she
played a title character.

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“When I started working professionally, I was about 14, 15. Immediately, I could never
go for any lead parts. As a young person of color, your world is being shaped deeply
unconsciously,” says Oh, who was raised in Ottawa by her Korean immigrant parents.
“It takes a lifetime to free yourself from your own diminished sense of possibility.”
But this isn’t the story of Sandra Oh being offered her first series lead role—this is the
story of Sandra Oh being offered what would become her second series lead role. By
the time the script for Netflix’s campus dramedy The Chair crossed her path, a few
years of post Killing-Eve accolades and magazine covers had forever changed the
course of her career. But there was another aspect of the script that helped make its
starring part feel like her own: the name of the titular English department chair, Dr. Ji-
Yoon Kim. In the novels that inspired Killing Eve, Eve is a white Brit, not Asian
American, and the show’s initial seasons barely touched on the ethnicity of the agent
locked in erotic espionage intrigue with Jodie Comer’s Villanelle. But in The Chair, Ji-
Yoon is purposefully, intentionally Korean-American.
THOMAS WHITESIDE/NETFLIX
The list of Oh’s accolades and history-making achievements is long enough to make for
dull reading, but includes the fact that she was the first person of Asian descent to host
the Golden Globe Awards, and the first Asian woman to win two of the trophies. She is
the most nominated Asian actor in Emmy history, and the only Asian woman ever to be
nominated for the award for best lead actress in a drama. Across her celebrated turn in
Killing Eve, her decade of playing the brilliant and sharp-elbowed Dr. Cristina Yang on
Grey’s Anatomy, and now as crisis-juggling academic Professor Kim on The Chair, Oh
delivers expert, intimate performances. Now, she’s leaving her mark on the TV
landscape—both in front of the camera and behind the scenes.
The Chair is a snarky but sincere workplace dramedy, one that brings a certain kind of
red-bricked liberal arts college to thoroughly realistic life. Helmed by showrunner
Amanda Peet and executive produced by Game of Thrones creators D.B. Weiss and
David Benioff (Peet's husband), the series counts among its main cast veteran talents
Holland Taylor and Bob Balaban, as well as actor and filmmaker Jay Duplass.
Ji-Yoon (Oh), Yaz (Mensah), and Joan (Taylor).

ELIZA MORSE/NETFLIX
Early in the series’ six-episode run, Ji-Yoon realizes that the glass ceiling she shattered
to become chair has actually left her tottering on the edge of a glass cliff, struggling to
keep the English department afloat amid budget cuts and academic culture wars.
Among her colleagues are aging professors played by Taylor and Balaban, who are
both attempting to maintain their positions in the face of shifting generational tides,
and Duplass, who perfectly embodies a certain kind of Gen X writer, greying and
rumpled, happy to embrace the trappings of institutional legitimacy while refusing to
relinquish his anti-authority mien. Recently widowed, he’s prone to noisy self-
destruction, and as he gets caught up in a campus firestorm, Ji-Yoon, who’s long
nurtured a crush on him, tries her best to pull him from the flames.
“We had to make intimacy out of nothing,” says Oh. She's referring to the challenge of
filming the show this winter under pandemic-era strictures and before widespread
vaccine availability, which forced the cast to forego the in-person rapport building that
usually takes place before the cameras roll. But the same might be said of any
production, even before the pandemic: from the collaborations of directors, writers,
producers, and actors, characters emerge who seem real, and familiar-feeling worlds
are created. Intimacy, born of thin air.
Bill (Duplass) and Ji-Yoon (Oh).

ELIZA MORSE/NETFLIX
“I'm sure many people understand this now, how much communication happens when
you are in the same room with someone,” says Oh. “You don't even necessarily need to
be speaking with them. And suddenly being isolated or having the need for masks and
shields and glasses, trying to communicate with people, [there is] a real barrier.”
Luckily, she was working with one of the most accomplished new series casts of the
year. The Chair’s five adult leads have accumulated 27 Emmy nominations among them
—12 of which belong to Oh herself.
Nothing makes for TV magic like watching actors who are both highly seasoned and
impeccably skilled playing off of each other in that crackling flow state of chemistry
and charisma, but conversely, it’s also a treat to watch newcomers who offer the
freshness and the verisimilitude of unfamiliar faces. (It’s the performances in between,
of inexpert actors just experienced enough to be jaded, that can be a little hairy.) The
Chair captures both extremes, with scenes devoted to Ji-Yoon’s work life finding Oh
paired with her deeply experienced peers, kvetching with Taylor or resisting the cost-
cutting overtures of the college’s dean, who’s played by David Morse. She and Duplass
spar and flirt endearingly as their characters test the boundaries of their workplace
friendship. Sometimes the personal charisma that attracts us to our most decorated
actors can be weighty on the screen, but in The Chair, as ever, Oh wears her magnetism
lightly.
The Chair | Official Trailer | Netflix
Ji-Yoon’s domestic life centers around her father and adoptive daughter, played by Ji
Yong Lee and seven-year-old Everly Carganilla, whose terrific performance threads the
needle between intimidatingly funny precocity and perfect grade-school innocence. Lee
is new to acting—“He's a retiree who lives in Atlanta,” says Oh. “I think he sold
insurance and he was just like, ‘I want to be an actor’”— and Oh’s scenes with the little
kid and elderly newcomer are among the series' richest.
As Duplass’s character is swept into a cascade of campus controversies, Ji-Yoon seesaws

between her desire to support him and her goals of modernizing the department and
helping its first Black woman faculty member, played by Nana Mensah, earn tenure.
The work of modernizing an unwieldy and often unwilling institution is something that
Oh has first hand experience in—it’s work she’s currently doing in Hollywood.
B
efore the mid-2000s, seeing a film or television character with an Asian given
name—or a non-Asian writer’s lazy approximation of one—generally signaled
that the audience was about to meet a one dimensional character, and perhaps
hear an accent that would be presented as the punchline to a malicious, centuries-old
joke. Later series attempted to course correct by erasing characters’ ethnic identities
altogether. Cristina Yang, Oh’s character on Grey’s Anatomy, was a Korean-American
surgeon working alongside a diverse array of colleagues, and while every facet of their
personal and sexual lives was thoroughly plumbed for primetime drama, race initially
was not.
“I call it the Obama years,” says Oh, referring to the imagined post-racial promise that
pervaded the early seasons of Grey's, “because we never talked about race, and I’m
pretty sure the show is different now.” (She’s right; recent episodes have found the
doctors of Grey Sloan Memorial treating racial justice protestors and a child victim of a
police shooting.) Now, movies and TV shows, particularly those with people of color
behind the camera—Oh is herself an executive producer on The Chair—are
acknowledging characters' specific cultural identities, with the goal of being respectful
and authentic.
Oh called into our interview from London, where she’s filming Killing Eve’s fourth and
final season. Oh, who serves as an executive producer on that show as well, can’t say
much about what its last episodes hold, only that she wants to make sure that the
series “serve[es] [its] characters well” in the end, “even Villanelle and Carolyn and
Constantin.”
But she highlights one aspect of the show’s third season, which finds Eve alienated
from her friends, nursing a gunshot wound, and taking refuge in her newfound work
as a cook at a Korean restaurant. It was the first time the show suggested that Eve
possessed cultural ties beyond those indicated by her American accent. “For me, it was
like she should be around the language, the sounds, the smells, the food,” says Oh. “I
just wanted to have something that was visual and grounding.”
On The Chair, Ji-Yoon spends her time at home casually alternating between speaking
Korean to her father, who doesn’t speak English, and her daughter, who doesn’t speak
Korean. In real life, Oh is far from a fluent Korean speaker. But she was determined to
nail just the sort of Korean Ji-Yoon should speak—that American-accented, English-
inflected take on her parents’ mother tongue that second generation immigrants with
roots all over the globe slip into at home and family gatherings.
Ji-Yoon (Oh) and her daughter, Ju Ju (Carganilla).

ELIZA MORSE/NETFLIX
“I speak such baby Korean,” says Oh. “I was adamant that I needed to get my Korean
up to the correct level that Korean-Americans speak Konglish to their parents.”
In her quest to nail the dialogue, Oh “really leaned on” editor Stacy Moon. “It was so
amazing, being able to talk to someone about this, something very specific,” says Oh. “I
was like, ‘Listen, I want my Korean not to grate your ears, because when you suddenly
hear your parents' language or a language that you know being completely butchered,
it throws you out of the show.’”
Oh’s interest in playing characters with fleshed-out cultural identities has repercussions
across the projects she selects. The writing staff has to include people who can write
them authentically, and the cast and crew must feature collaborators knowledgeable
enough to sniff out unconvincing Konglish. Oh’s upcoming projects find her working
with Asian-American filmmakers Iris Shim and Domee Shi, in the psychological horror
Umma and as one of the voice leads for Pixar’s Turning Red.
The breakthroughs made by Asian actors in Hollywood, reflected in historic

achievements of performers like Oh, and Youn Yuh-jung, and filmmaker Bong Joon Ho
have in recent months been placed against a grim backdrop—America’s steeply rising
rate of violent anti-Asian hate crimes. The attacks, which have disproportionately
targeted the elderly, are like “the nightmare that you've always been scared of,” says
Oh, “popping up and attacking your elders.” While The Chair was filming in
Pennsylvania, a shooter murdered six Asian-American women in Atlanta. Oh attended
a Stop Asian Hate protest in Pittsburgh, and led attendees in chanting “I am proud to
be Asian!
Sandra Oh At "Stop Asian Hate" Protest In Oakland
“It's like a horror show,” says Oh. “I realized that what I was hoping to address in that
moment in Pittsburgh was fear. Fear that, I think, in our community we've always had,
and never necessarily had an outlet, or an understanding [of] a way through it. We
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a37319316/sandra-oh-netflix-the-chair/?fbclid=IwAR1LyMx3wF07BrwDi09Uz159EVI7BYmyMEbWB8yyxtstSp… 10/15
need to lean on other people that might not be in our own sphere, family or culture.
It's time for us to open up, and it's time for us to move through fear.”
The protest was an immediate and visceral call to action against violence and bigotry.
But when it comes to changing Hollywood, Oh is looking at the “long game.”
“The nature of storytelling and image making goes very, very deep,” says Oh. “When
you see white kids dress up either as the Black Panther or as Raya, from Raya and the
Last Dragon, that's when you understand that storytelling has an ability to start shifting
culture.” This long game offers opportunities for new intimacies—intimacy with stories
that might have otherwise been untold and artists who could have gone unknown.
Even our interview was the result of Oh’s agitation for inclusivity, as she requested that
this article be written by a person of color. It’s not a request that will singlehandedly
reshape the entertainment landscape, but it’s one that nudges along my career, and the
careers of all the other writers of color who might now have the opportunity to cover
one of TV’s most decorated actors. It also shapes what that coverage might look like.
“What I already know by speaking to a writer of color or a writer who has an

immigrant background is that there is going to be a level of understanding,” says Oh.
“A different type of conversation can come about. And I, at this point, like living in that
conversation.”
Gabrielle Bruney
Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.
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8/27/2021 Sandra Oh Is Agitating for Real, Culture-Changing Inclusion

Sandra Oh Is Agitating for Real, Culture-Changing

THOMAS WHITESIDE / NETFLIX

Powerful Images of the Stop Asian Hate Rallies

Language Doesn't Define Me as an Asian American

Ways to Help End Violence Against Asian Americans

Ji-Yoon (Oh), Yaz (Mensah), and Joan (Taylor).

Bill (Duplass) and Ji-Yoon (Oh).

The Chair | Official Trailer | Netflix

As Duplass’s character is swept into a cascade of campus controversies, Ji-Yoon seesaws

Ji-Yoon (Oh) and her daughter, Ju Ju (Carganilla).

The breakthroughs made by Asian actors in Hollywood, reflected in historic

Sandra Oh At "Stop Asian Hate" Protest In Oakland

“What I already know by speaking to a writer of color or a writer who has an

Want more politics news and less politics noise?

Enter your email address. I'M IN.

Powered by Terms | Privacy | Feedback

5 Things to Know About Tom Hardy

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Oh, Give It Up, Mitt

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©2021 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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