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Sandra Oh opens up about first scene she shot for Netflix’s ‘The Chair’
Sandra Oh chats with USA TODAY’s David Oliver about Netflix’s “The Chair”, which she stars in and produces.
Entertain This !, USA TODAY
Sandra Oh has finally taken a seat at the table. More precisely, a chair.
“Killing Eve” star and former “Grey’s Anatomy” star in Netflix comedy series “The Chair” (airs Friday) as Ji-Yoon Kim, the new chair of the university’s English department fictional Pembroke. While yes, it’s a comedy, Ji-Yoon faces drama as the first woman to hold the job and one of the few employees of color at college.
Oh was hungry for comedy after playing MI-5 agent Eve Polastri in BBC America’s “Killing Eve”, which she says had a psychological impact.
“What Ji-Yoon is going through is not at all light, but I thought the circumstances were more amicable,” she laughs from London, where she is filming the fourth and final season of “Eve”.
Her tenure at the university is spiraling out of control: she must remove three professors from her staff, and the main candidates fear being expelled; her sweetheart and colleague Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass) anger students after his misguided Nazi salute in class; and she struggles to connect with her adopted daughter JuJu (Everly Carganilla). “The Chair” comes from co-creators Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman.
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You could have predicted that the problems would build up within minutes of the first of six episodes, when her new office chair would literally collapse and take it with her – a “beautiful and perfect metaphor,” Oh says.
This scene was the first she’s shot – meaning the pressure was on.
“I had to hit that comedy beat,” she says. “And I feel like we got there.”
Oh, 50, easily moves from comedy to drama – falling off said chair in that first scene and shedding silent tears the next – which she says reflects reality.
“You might be in a mad argument with your partner,” she said, “and then someone makes a face and you both start laughing. But it’s closer to life.”
Oh wonders if she was an excellent English student herself, even though she almost did journalism instead of acting in college. She connects the dots closer than you might think between the two aspirations: “Obviously what I do is fiction, and journalism is non-fiction, (but) there is a similar desire to discover and to discover things. “
She also delves into poetry, looking for poems for every project, year or part of her life. The one she recently discovered is “Our Real World” by Wendell Berry.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we got to our real job,
and that when we no longer know where to go
we have arrived at our real journey.
The mind that is not fazed is not employed.
The impeded current is the one that sings.
Maybe Oh’s “real job” and “real trip” is his activism. She gave an impassioned speech at a “Stop Asian Hate” protest in Pittsburgh last March, amid a surprising increase in hate crimes and murders of Asian Americans. Taking action also serves as an outlet for her activism, she says. She also encourages people to look at “The Chair” as a means of solidarity.
“To be able to play a character, which is hopefully an honest portrayal of a person, a woman, a woman of color, a woman of color who occupies a certain position. in her life, of a single mom, of someone trying to be a good girl, then maybe have a love affair with a friend and keep her institution going, that’s my activism, “says -she.
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Ji-Yoon’s Korean identity plays a central role in the series and acutely in his relationship with his Mexican daughter.
“I felt like Ji-Yoon, as the person she is, was absolutely going to integrate her child’s ethnicity and try to expose her child not only to her own culture, the culture of the mother, but the culture of origin of the child, ”she said.
Ji-Yoon faces grief as she fails to connect with her independent and precocious child. But that changes when she discovers JuJu’s ofrenda – a Mexican altar for “Day of the Dead,” which usually includes marigolds, candles, food, and photos of deceased loved ones – which she makes for a school project. He presents photos of Ji-Yoon’s late mother, and she can’t help but cry when she sees him.
Still, Oh can’t help but laugh as she thinks of another administrative role from her past: Vice Principal Gupta in “The Princess Diaries”, for which she “has such a soft spot in my heart.” In the 2001 film, she pokes fun at Queen Clarisse Renaldi (Julie Andrews), the grandmother of royal student Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway), after unexpectedly showing up in Gupta’s office.
“It was a very beautiful experience,” she says, dazed that the scene remains in people’s memories. “And to see this scene actually translated and have a life beyond that makes me really happy.”
The future looks brighter for Oh: she celebrated her birthday last month with her friends Awkwafina (“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”) and director Jessica Yu (“In Treatment”), who were both in London at the time.
“A great way to kick off your 50s, baby, I (have to) tell you,” she said. “It’s good, it’s good.”
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