‘I WANT TO SEE MYSELF AS THE HERO OF ANY STORY’
BEST KNOWN FOR HER ROLES IN GREY’S ANATOMY AND KILLING EVE, SANDRA OH TURNS 50 THIS WEEK, AND SHE’S MORE DETERMINED THAN EVER TO SHATTER GLASS CEILINGS AND CHALLENGE THE NORM
There are three roles you probably know Sandra Oh for: Christina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy, feisty Stephanie in the 2004 indie movie Sideways, and Eve Polastri in the hit BBC series Killing Eve. All different, all powerful and all characters that any actress would jump at the chance to play.
But when Sandra, who turns 50 this week, looks back at her career, she recognises that it was her role in Killing Eve that was most hard won.
After 30 years in the business, the Canadian-born actress acknowledges it was the part she had been waiting for all her life.
Having previously been typecast as a non-white actress, when she was first sent the script, written by Phoebe Waller-bridge, based on the books by Luke Jennings, she flicked through trying to work out which role had been earmarked for her. She had to ask her agent, who told her point-blank that she had been tapped up for the lead. “It took 30 years to get this call,” she said.
It really shouldn’t have been a surprise that she was cast as the bored MI5 operative opposite Jodie Comer, who plays the deliciously evil assassin Villanelle, as her career had been in the ascendant for years.
Her first acting credit goes back to 1989 and she had roles in a long list of projects including Waking The Dead, Six Feet Under, and Under The Tuscan Sun, but it wasn’t until 2004’s indie movie Sideways came out that she became a household name. The lowbudget film about two middle-aged men on a wine tasting trip was a breakout hit, and won a slew of awards.
Sandra was married to the film’s director Alexander Payne at the time, although they divorced after three years in 2006.
In 2005, she won the role of Christina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy becoming Meredith Grey’s ‘person’. She stayed on the show for 10 years and Ellen Pompeo, who plays Meredith, became a friend in real life, too.
But calls from Grey’s fans for her to return are batted away with grace and humility. She says, “In some ways, you do your work as a bubble and you let it go. So in my mind, it’s gone. But for a lot of people, it’s still very much alive. And while I understand and I love it, I have moved on.”
She adds of the medical drama’s enduring popularity, “I love it though, and this is also why I really appreciate the show.”
The daughter of middle-class South Korean immigrants Jeon Young-nam, a biochemist, and Oh Jun-su (John), a businessman, Sandra grew up in Nepean, Canada. One of the few Asian families in the area, Sandra showed an interest in acting from an early age and took ballet classes from age four.
Against her parents’ advice, she rejected a four-year journalism scholarship, to instead study drama at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. She paid her own way and promised her parents she’d go back to college if acting didn’t work out.
She has said of her heritage, “Koreans are ambitious, man. It means a lot to my parents that I do the work I do and it has visibility.”
They must also surely enjoy the fact that she was named by Time magazine as one of the top 100 influential people in the world in 2019. She was also the first Asian woman to host the Golden Globes that same year, and the first actress of Asian descent to be nominated for a primetime lead actress Emmy.
Now, she often uses her profile for activism. In March of this year, she gave a speech at a Stop Asian Hate rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in response to the Atlanta spa shootings.
“For many of us in our community, this is the first time we are even able to voice our fear and our anger,” she said on stage.
As for her career after 50, Sandra is looking forward to the next chapter in her life, and that means taking on meaningful roles and challenging the norms.
She says, “I grew up never seeing myself on screen, and it’s really important to me to give people who look like me the chance to see themselves. I want to see myself as the hero of any story.”