When “The Sympathizer” star Hoa Xuande was cast as the lead in the HBO limited series, it felt like he won the lottery. Then came the realization that the adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel rested on his shoulders.
“It dawned on me that I’m gonna have to do this,” Xuande tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “I think a couple of days after it was like, ‘Okay, great. You won the lottery. But what are you going to do with your money?’”
Created for television by Don McKellar and famed director Park Chan-wook (who directed three episodes and co-wrote all seven alongside McKellar and other writers), “The Sympathizer” is a satirical drama about the Captain (Xuande), a North Vietnamese spy who has infiltrated the South Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War and later relocates to America. Throughout the story, the Captain connects with various American authority figures, all played by Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr., including a CIA handler, a former professor, a corrupt politician, and a tempestuous director.
“Working with Robert, it’s so fun and silly a lot of the time because he’s just very spontaneous. He’s very witty, he’s got improvisations coming out of his mouth at any given time and you kind of just have to go along with that,” Xuande says. The trick, Xuande says, was making sure his response to Downey matched the relationships the Captain had with his costar’s various creations.
“I would remind myself, how do these characters affect me on this part of the journey? And then I have a very distinct relationship to each of these characters,” he says. “I had to hone myself into what each person meant to the Captain.”
Xuande’s role was tricky for reasons beyond the multi-pronged Downey performance. The Australian-born actor had to perfect two different dialects – an American accent that never falters once during the show, and a fluent grasp of Vietnamese.
“I kind of lived in the American accent for the entirety of the shoot, like six or seven months. There were people on the crew who didn’t know that I was Australian,” he says. “But the Vietnamese language, I grew up hearing but I never really spoke it. Shamefully, I never really saw a need for it. So I had a basic grasp of it enough to get by, but the producers put me through a two-week crash course to get my language abilities up to speed to recognize words to speak and all that stuff. So I came into this where it wasn’t at the level I needed to be, and they supported me in just getting to where I needed to.”
He also needed to keep the Captain’s various allegiances straight – no small task considering the show bounces through time and the production didn’t shoot linearly.
“That was one of the biggest challenges of shooting this thing,” Xuande says, noting his scripts were filled with notes about the timeline. “There were shooting days where Director Park, the first A.D., and Don McKellar, we were like, ‘Hang on, hang on. Let’s just take a break for a second. In this scene, what does the Captain know at this stage? And what did the other characters in the scene know at this stage?’ There was a lot of that. But I think that’s the beauty of things like this. It’s an espionage thriller, but it’s littered with clues and moments and hints. If you specify those moments, and you make those moments very detailed, it gives the viewer some richness to view again and again and again and work out those moments.”
“The Sympathizer” is a limited series and has a clear ending. But Nguyen did write a sequel book, “The Committed,” which continues the Captain’s story into the 1980s.
“It hasn’t escaped me,” Xuande says when the sequel book is mentioned. “I would love to continue telling this story. What’s presented in the second book is even more wild and crazy and heartbreaking and hilarious. If we’re so lucky to have that opportunity, I would jump on board in a heartbeat. But, you know, I guess right now, we’ll just see how this first season goes.”
But, he adds, “I’ve been just astounded by the response in the reviews and the reactions of people to the first season so far. When we did this project, it was telling a story that hadn’t been seen before from this perspective. To have the world respond to it in a very positive way has been reinforcing this notion that it’s time to tell stories that are different from the ones that we’re usually used to seeing.”
New episodes of “The Sympathizer” air Sundays on HBO.
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