Actress now free to talk about role in fifth season
HELL ON WHEELS
Saturdays, AMC
The details about Fong were sparse when actress Angela Zhou first auditioned for the role in Los Angeles.
According to the casting call for Hell on Wheels, she was a self-assured Chinese tomboy.
It wasn’t until callbacks, and only after signing a non-disclosure agreement, that Zhou discovered the character might be more challenging to play than initially advertised.
“They said, ‘ OK, so here’s the thing — she’s actually disguised as a boy on the railroad,’” Zhou said. “I was like ‘What?’ So I had to play the same scenes knowing that. I decided to go as dressed as much like the character as I possibly could.”
By now, fans of the post-Civil War western Hell on Wheels know the reverse Crying Game twist from Saturday’s episode. It was revealed that Fong, the headstrong young son of a Chinese railroad labourer, is actually Mei, the headstrong young daughter of a Chinese railroad labourer.
To help Zhou prepare for the role, producers hired a transgender man as a consultant — likely a first for a western TV series — who took the actress out for a “night on the town” in Calgary, where members of the transgender community offered tips on walking and talking like a boy.
But the hardest part of the experience was keeping it all secret. Zhou, who was born in China and raised in New Zealand, had been living the life of a struggling actress for less than a year when she won the role.
So not being able to talk about her first big break was more than a little painful.
“It’s been so difficult,” she said with a laugh. “Obviously, I just love to talk about the show. So I have been dying to talk to people about it. But also, we’ve had the occasional little slip-up from someone who maybe is just coming in for a day will tweet something ... and then hashtag my name. I’ve been taking down my Facebook page and all of that, just in case of the little slips.”
Now that the cat it out of the bag, Zhou is more than happy to talk about the intricacies of Mei. In the first couple of episodes of Season 5, her stubbornness brings violence to her father, Tao (Tzi Ma), and the unwanted attention of Chang (Byron Mann), a businessman who controls the Chinese workforce with a gangster’s ruthlessness.
The experiences of the Chinese labourers that helped build the Central Pacific Railway in the U.S. will be a major focus for the series’ final season, which will be split in half between this summer and next.
More than 15,000 Chinese men toiled on the project. Despite being hard-working and certainly healthier than other workers, they faced deep racism and treacherous conditions. They were also divided among themselves, with many still sporting scars from fighting on opposite sides of China’s own bloody civil war.