Shrinking woman is a big role for Chau
Big break. Hong Chau turns over the phrase. There have been many times the “Treme,” “Inherent Vice” and soon-to-be “Downsizing” star wondered if she was about to have one.
The New Orleans native has already gone from virtual unknown to budding television player to scene-stealer for directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Alexander Payne.
“Your first union job is like a break because now you’re in the union. ‘Treme’ was big, because that was my first time getting to return to a show,” said Chau, who played Linh for three seasons on the HBO series.
Her first movie role, playing a brothel employee with a heart of gold and secrets to share opposite Joaquin Phoenix in Anderson’s 1970s-set Los Angeles stoner noir “Inherent Vice,” effectively put her on the Hollywood map three years ago.
A few television stints followed as Chau turned up on NBC’s “A to Z” and, earlier this year, on HBO’s “Big Little Lies.” Making her second film appearance, in “Downsizing,” Chau steals the show again — this time from Matt Damon.
Payne’s science-fiction dramedy takes place in an alternate reality in which scientists have solved overpopulation by shrinking select human volunteers to the size of a Pop-Tart. Going “small,” dopey everyman Paul Safranek (Damon) finds his new life in a lavish resort community for miniature people lacking, but discovers meaning and newfound purpose in his budding friendship with Ngoc Lan Tran (Chau), a Vietnamese dissident shrunk against her will by the government.
Chau could relate to Ngoc Lan’s trials; her own parents fled Vietnam in 1979 by boat, ending up in the Thai refugee camp where she was born. “If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories,” she said. “But my parents had a difficult journey and their story always seems like a movie to me. So it’s nice, in some way, to kind of portray some fictionalized, adjacent version of their story.”
But the character has also faced scrutiny from critics over the heavily accented broken English she speaks in a cadence that some say veers into stereotype before the script — and Chau’s layered, dimensional performance — makes her a hero.
“One guy after a screening said, ‘So, that must have been a big deal for you, doing a character with an accent,’ ” said Chau. “I was like, ‘Why? Because she speaks broken English? Did she not come off as intelligent to you? What’s the problem?’ He didn’t even know what he had a problem with.”
Chau speaks highly of “Downsizing” and of working with Payne, and voices a reluctance to sound off exhaustively on issues of representation and inclusion in the industry. She acknowledges it’s hard in Hollywood for Asian female performers, but being choosy in her film work has reaped particularly enriching rewards so far.
“I don’t want anyone to think I took this role in ‘Downsizing’ because it was the only role available to me,” she said. “I’m not a passive participant in it. I actively went after this role after I read the script, I did the role the way I want to do it, and I felt like if I had an issue I could be honest with (Alexander) about it.”