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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us today. Tomorrow on the show, actor Jessica Chastain. She's on Broadway playing in the role of Nora in A Doll's House. The classic Ibsen play has been updated by playwright Amy Herzog. They'll both join me in studio to discuss. The restaurant Le Bernardin recently received a six four stars review from the New York Times, thanks in large part to the work of chef Eric Ripert. He will join us to discuss his work and take your calls. Now on to Hong Chau.

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It has been a big year for Hong Chau. She's earned her first Oscar nomination, was the standout in the acclaimed comedy The Menu, and was called out in that Ariana DeBose's BAFTA rap. In The Menu, Chau plays the frighteningly, intense and hilarious maître d' Elsa who is completely devoted to fine dining chef Julian Slowik. She might be a little bit sadistic. Elsa's job is to do everything in her power to keep a group of wealthy and shady diners seated during a potentially deadly meal like in this scene where one older oh so entitled couple attempts to leave the restaurant.

[videoplayback]

Mr. Leibrandt: We're leaving now.

Mrs. Leibrandt: I have to get my wrap.

Mr. Leibrandt: Forget your wrap. Get up.

Elsa: Mr. Leibrandt.

Mr. Leibrandt: We're leaving.

Elsa: Is something wrong?

Mr. Leibrandt: We're leaving.

Elsa: There is no boat to leave on.

Mr. Leibrandt: Then I'll call a helicopter.

Elsa: That would be very difficult without phone service.

Mr. Leibrandt: Fucking move.

Mrs. Leibrandt: Just do what they say for god's sake.

Mr. Leibrandt: I'll handle this.

Elsa: With which hand, Mr. Leibrandt?

Mr. Leibrandt: What?

Elsa: With which hand will you handle this? Left or right?

Mr. Leibrandt: What the fuck are you saying?

Elsa: Shall we choose?

Mr. Leibrandt: Choose what?

Elsa: Very well. Left hand, ring finger.

Mr. Leibrandt: Let me go. Let me go. No.

Alison: Oh, it's so creepy. In her Oscar-nominated film The Whale, Chau plays Liz, a nurse and the best friend of Brendan Fraser's, Charlie, a housebound, obese man with heart failure. Liz loves Charlie deeply and cares for him both physically and mentally. Her behavior also tips over into enabling. Charlie's heart is rapidly failing and he knows it. Liz can't convince him to go to the hospital. The Menu is streaming on HBO Max. Now, The Whale is still in select theaters here in the city and available on video on demand. I'm joined now by Oscar nominee Hong Chau. Hong, welcome.

Hong Chau: Hi. Thank you for having me.

Alison: I understand The Whale had its origins here in New York. Of course, it was a play first and it was filmed in Newburgh. That Brendan and director Darren Aronofsky did a little table read in the East Village in around 2019. Where were you when you heard about this part?

Hong: Yes, Darren organized a table read right before the pandemic started and I'm a little jealous I wasn't a part of that. I would have loved to have a year to just marinate on the play. I heard about The Whale in January of 2021. It came the regular way. My agent sent me a script for it and just told me that the character was Brendan Fraser's best friend. I thought, okay, that doesn't sound that exciting.

[chuckles]

I had just had a baby, so I was way more excited about staying at home and being a mother. I read the script and I was really moved by it. Being an older, first-time parent, I was already sort of lamenting that I wouldn't get to know my daughter for as long as I wanted to. I just really empathized with Brendan Fraser's character in the story, trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter in the final days of his life.

Alison: It sounds like the entire project was as interesting to you as the role itself.

Hong: Yes. I never could have dreamed that I get to work with Darren Aronofsky. He's one of our greatest filmmakers, and his films are really hard to nail down. They're so divisive. You can talk to one friend whose taste you trust, and they love the film, and then you talk to another one and they absolutely hate it. That was the reaction that people had with Mother and even with Black Swan. It was really exciting because when I read the script, I thought it was very odd that Darren would choose to work on something like this because it just seemed a little bit more I don't know if traditional is the right word. It was such an emotional piece, and I was curious to see what he was going to do with it, how he would really be able to put his stamp as a director on it.

Alison: Liz is a nurse, and she knows that her friend Charlie is close to death and that his body is stressed to the max. Yet she does what friends do she brings him food, she watches TV with him, she gets him a wheelchair so he can be mobile. How does Liz, your character, square her duty as a healthcare provider with her duty as a friend?

Hong: All of those behaviors that the audience finds just puzzling really comes out of their history together. Those things didn't happen overnight. I think with any profound relationship that I've been witnessed to, there's all sorts of weird contradictions and strange codependent tendencies. With Liz, she has to find ways to sort of trick him into doing something that she thinks is going to be good for him. There's a little bit of manipulation that seeps in there that might be unhealthy for both of them. Liz is also dealing with grief and unprocessed grief, and she pours all of her energy outside of work into that relationship with Charlie. It might not be the healthiest thing for her either.

Alison: Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I read that you had tattoos put on your skin by the makeup artist to give Liz some backstory, but we don't necessarily see them.

Hong: Yes, the character wasn't written specifically for an Asian person. Every actress who had played this character in the stage play had been white. Even during the casting process, my agent told me the names of the other actresses who were in consideration, and none of them were Asian. When I was cast, Sam Hunter, our writer, added a line in there about Liz being adopted. I don't think it's necessary to add that in there. I did think it was very helpful for me to sort of envision what her childhood must have been like growing up in a small town in Idaho, probably the only Asian person and also being in a very conservative religious family, and how she would probably react and rebel.

I thought, well, she probably had some wild child days, probably went to some raves, got some tattoos to piss off her parents. I asked Darren if I could have those, and I wasn't sure if you would see them on camera or not. It's always nice if you can give little hints about a character's past without dialogue. He happily obliged, and you don't really see them in the movie that much. It was very nice to spend that time in the morning getting those tattoos applied.

Judy Chin came up with this really beautiful tattoo of Charlie and Allen as two fish entwined, and it was just really beautiful in the way that Brendan got his makeup applied, I also had my version of that. I asked Danny Glicker, our costume designer if we could give her a wardrobe that made her seem like she ate cold leftover mozzarella sticks for breakfast.

[laughter]

I think we nailed it.

Alison: My guest is Hong Chau. She is nominated for an Academy Award in Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The Whale. What was unique about this filmmaking process? Something that you really hadn't experienced in other sets?

Hong: Well, I had never done an extensive rehearsal period for a film before. We had three weeks of rehearsal. We were working on one stage while the set was being built on another stage. We had painter's tape on the ground that were the exact dimensions of the set that we would be shooting on because Darren wanted to know where he should put the camera to best showcase and tell the story.

The story takes place almost entirely on one set in Charlie's apartment, which is difficult to keep the story interesting and maintain the audience's attention and interest. For us, for the actors, there was a lot of heavy dialogue and we really had to make those words sing. It was a really valuable time for everyone to work out all of those aspects and find those moments because once we got on set with the limitations of Brendan's suit, we really had to be focused and intentional in every take that we did.

Alison: Even though It is a very dialogue-heavy film. To your point, it's in one space. I think there's just a couple of exteriors on a porch. There's a lot of physicality in the role and there's still a lot that you have to do with your body, even though it is in this one contained space. When you thought about Liz's physicality, how would you describe it? How would you describe your approach, the way she is in the world, the way she physically is?

Hong: When I had my daughter, it was my first time being in a hospital and being around nurses. What they do is incredibly physical. To lift people, to clean them, to feed them, to help them go to the bathroom. It's so much physical labor, and it takes a really patient and strong person to do that. I took all of those experiences from being in the hospital and all of the different nurses that I met, and I put that towards Liz. Even as an actor, yes, I found it an oddly physical role because we had to be moving around so much because Brendan's character was mostly stationary on the couch. So we were just like planets orbiting our sun.

Darren would always be having me go from here to there or doing something. That's my big fear or weakness as an actor is, at least to me. I always struggle with handling props or memorizing a whole sequence of physical spots that I need to be and also maintaining [chuckles] some casualness with the dialogue when I have all of this information in my head that I need to check off. Which is why I found it so remarkable during Brendan's scenes when he's overeating and there's like a whole sequence in there that I just found technically very impressive. It's so difficult for me, at least. I just thought Brendan did such an incredible job.

Alison: My guest is Hong Chau. She is in the film The Whale. She's also in the film The Menu, which you can stream on HBO Max so this character of Elsa was described in the script as a severe Scandinavian woman [chuckles].

Hong: Yes.

[laughter]

Alison: You are a petite Asian-American brunette. What made you go up for the part?

Hong: It was my desire to work with Mark Mylod. I was a fan of Succession, and I just was curious who he was as a person, and I wanted to be on set with him. I was also a huge fan of Ralph Fiennes, and I knew that he was attached to play the role of the chef. I had a great time. It was really wonderful to get to see Ralph's work. I've never been in a situation where it felt like we were being treated to a one-man show [laughs].

Just the way that the movie, that the story is that we're all sitting there, or most of the people are sitting at tables and watching the chef explain each of the courses that are being presented. It was just odd that we found ourselves just watching Ralph get to be this very enigmatic and also terrifying character.

Alison: We actually had Mark on the show when the film came out. He's an interesting person, Mark Mylod. Did you go into the research bunker on fine dining, high-end restaurants, how they run?

Hong: No. You know COVID has really changed all of that. It's really hard to go out and physically in person and research things. It may be a little bit less now that more people are vaccinated or have gotten COVID. At that time, COVID was still a pretty scary thing. We were just trying to be as careful as possible. I do have a little bit of experience, life experience with restaurants. My parents, when I was younger, had two failed attempts at running a restaurant. When they first came over to the US. They had worked in restaurants in the back. My dad would wash dishes and was like a busboy. My mum also would do the food prep.

They had experienced primarily with Chinese restaurants, and Vietnamese food had not become popular yet. They had opened up a Chinese restaurant, and it was just really, really difficult. I saw firsthand how difficult it is to maintain a restaurant. It takes so much work, and we had so many bad customers.

[laughter]

It felt like I knew where Elsa was coming from, even though it was a much more exclusive restaurant for a higher, more elite clientele.

Alison: She gets to help the bad restaurantgoers have their comeuppance. There's one clip that's gone viral from the menu. Your performance and the background of the scene is that this group of high-powered, investment bro, silicon Valley types, have just received tortillas as part of their meal. They looked down and they realized there's something printed on the tortillas. Let's listen to Hong Chau in The Menu.

[videoplayback]

Bryce: Excuse me.

Elsa: Can I help you sir?

Bryce: What the hell are these?

Elsa: These are tortillas, tortillas deliciosa.

Bryce: What are these?

Elsa: These are tortillas, which contain EchoBrite's tax records and other documents showing how your company has created invoices with fake charges.

Bryce: How did you get these?

Elsa: I'm sorry, but Chef never reveals his recipes.

Soren: Do you know how fucked you are? I'll have this place closed by the morning. Do you understand?

Elsa: Oh, no. That won't be necessary. Enjoy.

Alison: "That won't be necessary. Enjoy." So good. So cold. Why do you think that clip has struck a code with people, that people are sending that around?

Hong: I honestly, I don't know. I knew the line was really funny when I read it, and I was excited to say the line.

[laughter]

It really has taken on a life of its own.

Alison: We're seeing quite a few of these dark comedies skewering elitism, whether it's Glass Onion or Triangle of Sadness and The Menu. Do you have a sense of why this is something that people are interested in?

Hong: I think it's a problem that we're all collectively trying to solve, and part of that is just expressing it. I think that the people who enjoy The Menu movies, like the movies you just mentioned, why they enjoy The Menu so much is because they do recognize and see what a divide we have in this country or in the world between the haves and the have not's. It's just something we're all just trying to process. The more we talk about it, maybe we'll find that answer.

Alison: Upcoming you're starring alongside Michelle Williams in the latest film from Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up. What can you let us know about that project?

Hong: I think it's Kelly Reichardt's first comedy, so I'm just excited to be a part of it. Kelly Reichardt, you can't really tell this from her previous movies, but she's an incredibly funny person. [laughs] She's got a wicked sense of humor. I'm really excited for Showing Up. I think Michelle Williams is really funny in it, and there were so many parallels between actors and artists of-- Michelle Williams plays an artist who deals mostly with ceramics and my character is an artist who does these really big beautiful art installations. There's a rivalry, but also a lot of respect and friendship between them. It's something that I think a lot of people in any area of the arts can really identify with, particularly, actors.

Alison: We have so many artists and actors who listen to this show. We're in New York City, we're on during the middle of the day, whether they're people who are in shows now or out auditioning. What is a piece of advice you would give to an aspiring actor who's listening right now?

Hong: I would say don't be so eager to please [laughs]. I know that's really hard when you're first starting out. You just want to please everybody. I think that was probably what made me feel the sickest, in the beginning, was just that I wasn't being true to myself because I was just trying to please people. Then once I figured out how to let that go, I felt better about myself. Then I think my work just got better too. I think people who I worked with felt they were maybe seeing more of me. I don't know how you end up getting there, but just try to care less.

Alison: Hong Chau is nominated for best supporting actress for her performance as Liz in The Whale. That film is still in select theaters here in New York, and she stars as Elsa in The Menu, which is streaming now on HBO Max. Thank you for being with us. Really appreciate your time.

Hong: Thank you, Alison. Thanks for having.

 

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