Sandra Oh’s unexpected new Netflix role
Sandra Oh finally has a seat at the table. More specifically, a chair.
The “Killing Eve” and former “Grey’s Anatomy” star sits in Netflix comedy series “The Chair” (now streaming) as Jiyoon Kim, the new chair of the English department at fictional Pembroke University. While yes it is a comedy, Ji-yoon faces drama as the first female to hold the position and one of only a few employees of color at the university.
Oh grew hungry for a comedy after playing MI-5 agent Eve Polastri on BBC America’s “Killing Eve,” which she says took a psychological toll.
“What Ji-yoon goes through is not light at all, but I thought the circumstances were friendlier,” she says, laughing from London, where she’s shooting the fourth and final season of “Eve.”
Her college tenure spirals out of control: She needs to cut three professors from her staff, and the prime candidates fear they’re being pushed out; her love interest and colleague Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass) angers students after his misguided Nazi salute in class; and she’s struggling to connect with her adoptive daughter Juju (Everly Carginilla). “The Chair” comes from co-creators Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman.
You could have predicted problems would mount minutes into the first of six episodes, when her new office chair literally falls apart and takes her down with it – a “beautiful, perfect metaphor,” Oh says.
That scene was the first she shot – meaning the pressure was more than on.
“I had to hit that comedy beat,” she says. “And I feel like we got there.”
Oh, 50, slips between comedy and drama easily – falling out of said chair in that first scene and shedding quiet tears the next – which she says mirrors reality.
“You might be in a crazy argument with your partner,” she says, “and then someone does an expression and you both start laughing. But that’s closer to life.”
Oh questions whether she was a great English student herself, though she nearly pursued journalism instead of acting in college. She connects the closer-thanyou’d-think dots between both aspirations: “Obviously, what I do is fiction, and journalism is nonfiction, (but) there’s a similar drive to uncover and discover things.”
She also pores over poetry, hunting down poems for each project, year or section of her life. One she discovered recently is “Our Real World” by Wendell Berry.
It may be that when we no longer know what to dowe have come to our real work,and that when we no longer know which way to gowe have come to our real journey.the mind that is not baffled is not employed.the impeded stream is the one that sings.
Perhaps Oh’s “real work” and “real journey” is her activism. She delivered a passionate speech at a “Stop Asian Hate” protest in Pittsburgh last March, amid a startling increase of hate crimes and killings of Asian Americans. Acting also serves as an outlet for for her activism, she says, and encourages people to watch “The Chair” as a means of solidarity.
“To be able to play a character, that is hopefully an honest portrayal of a person, a woman, a woman of color, a woman of color who is at a certain position in her life, a single mom, someone who’s trying to be a good daughter, and then maybe have a romance with a friend and keep her institution going, is my activism,” she says.
Ji-yoon’s Korean identity plays a pivotal role in the series, and acutely in her relationship with her Mexican daughter.