Host: The Oscars will be given out soon, and among the Best Picture nominees, and there are a lot of them, is the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. In many ways, it seems the most surprising film and it's considered a real front-runner.

It's not an earnest drama, a magnificent spectacle, or a beloved nostalgia remake. Everything Everywhere All at Once is really a genre unto itself. A loopy science fiction quest that somehow evolves into a martial-arts revenge battle, and it's crossed with a sentimental family drama of a mother and a daughter trying to understand each other.

Michelle Yeoh is nominated for Best Actress playing Evelyn, the hapless owner of a laundromat. Stephanie Hsu is nominated for Supporting Actress playing her depressed daughter, Joy, and is also the film's deranged supervillain, Jobu.

Stephanie Hsu: The relationship between Evelyn and Joy, in its simplest terms, is very fraught. It is a story of a relationship of a daughter who's a lesbian, who's deeply longing for her mother's acceptance, but they keep chasing each other around in the universe and they can just never find one another until, of course, they launch into the multiverse and become nemesis.

Host: Stephanie Hsu spoke last spring, just after the movie came out, with Jia Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Jia Tolentino: So much about the world seems just extremely overwhelming and bad and broken. Every time you look at your phone, you're reminded, by nightmare social media, of the nightmare situation in Ukraine and the housing crisis and the unending pandemic, and just injustice wherever you look, right? And we all feel this all the time, but one of the things that people have responded to so strongly in Everything Everywhere is that the movie seems to sketch out some sort of standpoint about how to live in a world that is overwhelming and bad and broken, right?

How to value that world and love that world despite, and even because, it's that way. I wonder, how would you describe the movie's perspective on all of that?

Stephanie Hsu: Wow, Jia, that was such a beautiful articulation of this moment in time, as well as how it relates to our movie. Honestly, in some ways, it's been really surreal because we shot this film before the pandemic and we could not have possibly known how much the world was going to need our little offering. I have to say, my biggest conflict with being an actor or being a part of this industry is sometimes, I fear that what we do is not enough or that, how is it possible when there's a war, when there's climate disaster-- not even "crisis," constant climate disaster, everything feels like it's crumbling, how is art going to help it?

I feel like the release of this film and witnessing how people are responding to it is giving me some sort of full-circle healing because I think the movie's stance is, "Yes, there are a million other universes that we could be in. There are a lot of possibilities if we went right instead of left that one time, but there's a lot that we don't know." In some ways, I think I am someone who's constantly searching for meaning, but when I was working on this project, I would say that nihilism, in some way, saved my life because if nothing matters, then it's true that we're all just trying to figure it out together.

Jia Tolentino: In a way, I mean, that's your character, Joy. That's her journey, right? It's from starting off at a point where it feels like nothing matters. From "nothing matters," to "it all matters."

Stephanie Hsu: I think what I love about Joy, this sort of despondent, queer daughter, and Jobu, a nihilistic creator of chaos, goddess, and maniac, is that actually something that was really important for all of us was to make sure that the center of their beings, these two characters, were actually from the same heartbeat.

That spirit of nihilism can either pull you off the deep end and make you feel like there's no reason to continue or it can slingshot you into the other direction, which is, "I will just create as much chaos as possible because none of this matters."

Jia Tolentino: For you, playing these two very different characters, was there anything you reached for physically or in terms of your inner process when you were switching back and forth? What did you reach for when you needed to feel that continuity between them?

Stephanie Hsu: I think of both Joy and Jobu as hyper, hyper-empaths. I think the most important thing that I felt like I needed to share with the two characters was this really real feeling, from my own life, of just overwhelm, of-- I mean, it's feeling the world, like the absolute weight of not only this universe, but all the universes that come before, and then imagining what future lies ahead, just really tapping into that.

Then, for Joy-- obviously, she's a much more intimate character and getting to play in that physical manifestation of sadness or ugliness, or just wanting to be small, versus Jobu, we did a lot of improvisation, and because she's a omniscient being and not quite human, I was really channeling a lot of amoeba/noodle energy of like, if Jobu was a cartoon, she'd be able to [mimics exploding sound] and explode into a particle or then, [mimics exploding sound], explode into a basketball player, and trying to embody that availability in her physicality.

Jia Tolentino: It's funny. I was going to say it's very telling that at first when Joy comes on screen, I had no idea that she was depressed. I was like, "That's on me." I was like, "Oh, this is just a realistic depiction of what it's like to be a daughter of immigrants who's living in a different world than her parents." Then halfway through, I was like, "Oh. Oh, she's not well."

Stephanie Hsu: Yes.

[laughter]

Jia Tolentino: This movie really felt like a landmark for me because of the exact way that it foregrounded and centered an Asian immigrant story because the movie not just mirrors, but really actively explores the way that the particularities of identity feel to me. You've talked, in another interview, about how you thought the film, in a way, transcended identity politics, and I wondered if you had any more thoughts on that subject.

Stephanie Hsu: Yes. I think that there's such amazing movement that's happening in terms of visibility. I just watched Turning Red, the new Pixar movie, and just cried the whole time. If I had seen that when I was a kid, my entire life, my own inner Red Panda of this thing that I now do with my career, I think I would've unleashed it much sooner.

It's also, what I love about that movie and our movie is that it's reaching so many people outside of just the AAPI community. I just think that beyond, it is so crucial to have conversations, and specific conversations, about how individuals or different cultures grow up or grow in society.

I'm looking forward to continue to broaden our horizon so much that five, 10 years from now, identity isn't something that we're using as a flex and more of just a part of a texture of a story that is crucial and critical, but also not the only fruit that that piece bears.

Jia Tolentino: Yes. For all of the complexity and the million universes, the movie really centers on something very intimate, which is this intergenerational conveyance, or non-conveyance, of care and love and, specifically, the relationship between a mother and a daughter. I was so moved.

Michelle Yeoh is my mom's age. I was so moved by the centering of a suburban Asian mom in her sneakers and her bootcut weekday pants as this universe-saving hero. That felt so wonderful to me.

[movie advertisement]

Jia Tolentino: I wanted to ask you-- could I ask you about your mom's reaction to the movie? Have you watched it with her?

Stephanie Hsu: Yes, totally. My mom, she came to the LA premiere. She definitely wasn't a huge advocate for me when I was growing up to be an actor. She was very puzzled by that choice, [chuckles] or that pursuit, but she saw the movie, and after, I asked her-- She was kind of quiet and I asked her, "Did you like it?" And she just nodded behind her mask and she said, "Yes." Then she pointed to the movie screen and she goes, "I'm crying. That's me."

It's really wild because at the-- of course because I was playing Joy and Jobu, so much of my entry point was from the point of view of a daughter, but really hearing her say that-- not even her saying that to you, but her saying, "That's me," made me feel that the movie also offered her healing too of not only her relationship with me but also of her relationship with her parents because, yes, we have "Gong Gong" in the picture. We have the grandfather in the picture, and it was really special.

I still reflect-- I'm still chewing over that interaction with her because I've been hearing a lot of people saying that they watched the movie or they send their parents to watch the movie and then their parents call them and apologize, and I just think that is such a-- This movie, I'm proud of it for so many reasons, but the biggest gift has been that I very palpably feel that it is offering people healing, and that is all I could ever wish for, for any piece of art that I put out into the world.

It's helpful to remember that art is capable of doing that, to moving us into action.

Jia Tolentino: Yes. I mean, I was thinking about this when we were talking about wanting to avoid the trap of re-essentializing identity because I feel like the whole point of valuing the particularities of anyone's identity is not to enshrine them in stone, but to move towards a world where everyone's identity is crucially important but, also, you understand identity is fundamentally fluid and fundamentally incidental.

Stephanie Hsu: When I first started, there was no Crazy Rich Asians, there was no Parasite, there was no Turning Red or Everything Everywhere, right? And I think that this movie and how it's been received is giving me permission, really deep permission, for the first time in my life, to really love this thing that I do because I'm not a doctor, I don't have-- The skill sets or the gifts that I've been given are in this little corner of the world, and it is immense actually.

There's great responsibility in being a person who shifts culture, and so if that is the toolbox I've been given, then I better use it wisely and hold it with grace and enjoy it and celebrate it.

[music]

Host: That's Jia Tolentino, a staff writer for The New Yorker, speaking with Stephanie Hsu, whose performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once is up for an Oscar, along with the film's 10 other nominations.

[music]

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.