Hong Chau’s revealing life story
Her performance has Downsizing looking up.
NEW YORK – Hong Chau was in the midst of a photo shoot last week when she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award for her new movie, Downsizing.
Her publicist got the news and “was just about to tell me when the photographer said: ‘Don’t smile. Look really serious,’ ” Chau, 38, recalls a few hours later. “So she was like, ‘I’m just going to wait to tell Hong after it’s over.’ ”
SAG is the third major awards group to bestow the relative newcomer with a best-supporting-actress nomination this season, joining the Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards. But the recognition shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has seen Alexander Payne’s Downsizing (in theaters now nationwide). Many critics have singled her out as its scene-stealer.
The social satire follows a Midwestern schlub named Paul (Matt Damon) who undergoes the groundbreaking procedure known as “downsizing,” in which scientists shrink people to 5 inches tall to combat overpopulation and climate change. With his personal finances multiplied living as a “small,” Paul moves to miniature luxury community Leisureland, where he’s shocked to discover impoverished immigrants subsisting on the outskirts.
Among them is Ngoc (Chau), a resolute Vietnamese dissident who was shrunk against her will and escaped to the USA in a cardboard TV box. The character loosely parallels Chau’s own parents, who fled Vietnam by boat in 1979 when her mom was six months pregnant with her. She was born in a refugee camp before they were taken in by a sponsor family in New Orleans.
“I really responded to the way (Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor) humanize the refugee story,” Chau says. “There’s a lot of humor and affection, and you need that when you’re dealing with tough topics.”
After seeing Chau’s audition tape, Payne ( Sideways, The Descendants) met her for coffee in Los Angeles, where he learned about her family’s history.
“She was the answer to our prayers,” he says. “She’s got that depth inside of her, which I’m sure informed the part.”
The character was written to illustrate how “miniaturization would’ve rippled around the world,” including how it could be abused, Payne says. But the depiction hasn’t been without controversy: The Guardian noted that Ngoc’s heavily accented pidgin English is “milked repeatedly for laughs,” and
ScreenCrush called it an “icky, racist caricature” of an Asian immigrant.
Chau jumps to Payne and Taylor’s defense, explaining how Ngoc “hasn’t been in the U.S. long, so logically, (her broken English) makes sense.”
A natural introvert who started acting as a way to break out of her shell, Chau has worked steadily in TV and movies for more than a decade, appearing in HBO’s Treme and Big Little Lies and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent
Vice. Early on, she says, she was mainly considered for one-off roles that “might not have necessarily had an ethnicity attached to them, but they’d be for the barista, the waitress or the cop.”
Now she looks for specificity in characters rather than scripts that ignore race altogether.
“That shows me the writer knew the story so well and had such a clear vision that they saw what color this person was and everything that entails,” she says. “If (Spanish filmmaker) Pedro Almodóvar asked me to be a wacky exchange student in Spain, I know that his would be the most fresh and original.”