A spy divided
As an Australian of Vietnamese heritage, actor can appreciate duality of his character in ‘The Sympathizer’
The bifurcate man has been the subject of many a novel, film and TV show; authors and directors have long pondered the complex facets of our identities and the allegiances — family, love, politics, religion — that can cause rifts within us.
Sometimes these chasms are more literal, as in the film “Fight Club” and the novel “Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde”; other times, they are more abstract. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” is an example of the latter: a cerebral, intelligent tale set in the years following the Vietnam War. Published in 2015, it has now been adapted for television by an unlikely but prodigious duo: legendary Korean director Park Chan-Wook and Canadian actor and writer Don McKellar.
McKellar, a multi-hyphenate fixture of Canadian film and TV, cocreated “The Sympathizer” with Park Chan-Wook (director of “Oldboy” and “Decision to Leave”) and co-wrote the teleplays for all eight episodes.
Like the book, the show follows the Captain (Hoa Xuande), a spy for the Viet Cong who escapes to the United States following the fall of Saigon and reports back to his Communist commanders from within a refugee community in California.
The Captain is biracial (French and Vietnamese), bilingual and working for two warring sides, and the show charts how these aspects of him sometimes attract each other and sometimes repel into two incongruent halves.
“The Captain is challenged in many different ways,” said Xuande of his tricky protagonist, the day after the Canadian premiere of the series at the TIFF Lightbox. “Because of his different allegiances he has to hide his identity from everyone — even his best friends — which has a larger consequence of initiating a struggle within his own sense of self.”
It’s a feeling Xuande can appreciate. Born in Sydney and raised in Melbourne in an immigrant Vietnamese family, Xuande noted that he was never surrounded by a large Vietnamese community.
“As an Australian with Vietnamese heritage, throughout my life I struggled to figure out whether I was Australian enough or Vietnamese enough. There were times where I admit that I felt shame speaking Vietnamese.” It’s a hard but rewarding journey to learn that your heritage is not easily forgotten or disposed of. “Doing a show like ‘The Sympathizer’ helped me see a complete image of myself.”
And while working on the show has allowed Xuande to understand himself, this process is the inverse for the Captain.
In the pilot — a fast-paced, nonlinear masterpiece of mystery and intrigue directed by Park and cowritten with McKellar — the Captain is in control of his dual identities, navigating his American alliances while collecting and delivering intelligence on them with ease. It is only after he successfully seeks refuge in the United States and meets a myriad of interesting characters — chief among them Sandra Oh’s impressive Ms. Sofia Mori — that his identities begin to blur and resist each other.
Oh plays the Captain’s colleagueturned-lover, who challenges his perception of love and romance. Oh’s performance has a lot of depth in the way it manoeuvres initial antipathy, followed by coyness and then scorned love. In their heavy conversations, rife with political musings, Xuande and Oh portray their characters as eager combatants in what can only be described as a conflict of love.
Speaking of Oh, Xuande remembered her as an invested screen partner: “Sandra was warm and lovely, she embodied Ms. Mori in every way.”
Oh is not the only big name that “The Sympathizer” touts in its cast: Robert Downey Jr., in his first role since winning an Oscar for “Oppenheimer” last month, plays four different characters, including a temperamental film director named Niko (loosely based on Francis Ford Coppola) and a too-cool-forschool CIA agent named Claude.
“Robert is so generous and fun, he gives great advice and it was so easy to be around him that I had to constantly remind myself to be antagonized by him,” said Xuande.