‘DOWNSIZING’ ACTRESS

NEW YORK: In the year after landing her first big-screen part, as a massage parlour employee in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 curio Inherent Vice, Hong Chau couldn’t get an audition for a movie.

“I did a regional car commercial and an Internet potato chip commercial,” Chau said recently. “I was seriously thinking I needed to quit and get a serious job where I can feed myself and it doesn’t kill my soul.”

Now, she is the toast of this awards season, earning Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe nominations for her brusque yet endearing turn as Ngoc

Lan Tran, a dissident who loses a leg while escaping

Vietnam in a television set box (did we mention her character is 12cm tall?), in the new eco-fantasy, Downsizing.

“I’m glad this character is so intersectional,” she said. “She’s an Asian woman with a disability. In life, we are all more than one thing, but for some reason, in movies, you’re either this or that. It reduces the complexity of a human being in so many ways.”

But like that lean year after Inherent Vice, the controversy surrounding her latest role points out the obstacles Asian performers face in Hollywood, where the opportunities are few and the pitfalls are abundant. After early screenings of

some reviewers and audience members criticised the role as a caricature, with her thickly accented broken English played for laughs.

“It’s a tricky thing to have to hear that feedback,”