INTERVIEW BY IRVIN RIVERA, INTRODUCTION and Edited BY CLARA SEELY-KATZ

Stephanie Hsu is QUICKLY BECOMING A HOUSEHOLD NAME because of her major role as Joy/Jobu in the recently released Everything Everywhere All at Once, a surprise hit, and now widely loved arthouse film. But if the name sounds familiar it is probably because of her myriad of previous acting credits both on stage and on film. Between her work in theater, “dumb” comedies (as she puts it), and thought-provoking films, she is becoming quite the ubiquitous actor.

I personally was first introduced to Hsu through Amazon Prime’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, in which she portrays Mei Lin, a sharp, witty, and bright-eyed character who instantly captured my attention and my heart. Although the show has some great writers and directors behind it, it was truly Hsu’s acting and the pure life that pulsed through her performance that made her unforgettable. Years later, she captured my screen and attention once again in Everything Everywhere and although many around me were just being introduced to the layered and colorful performance of Hsu, I was already accustomed to her level of acting and was not surprised that she soon became a fan favorite. When she first came on screen, I couldn't help myself, I turned to my friend and loudly whispered, oh my god it's her! I love that actor!

Hsu is just as dynamic in conversation as she is on stage or screen. She practically brims with enthusiasm and clever quips and quotes to live by. Having been mentored by Elizabeth Swados, infamous amongst theater fans, and a creative in the truest sense, it is not hard to see where she gets her heart from. After such a success Hsu has decided to take a step back for a while and reassess, not charge ahead blindly in her career, but do it with intention and thought. Catching her in this moment of pause allowed the conversation to touch on not only Everything Everywhere, but her experiences in theater, being a major face of the growing Asian representation in Hollywood, and how she seems to keep drawing drive and inspiration from a seemingly endless well of creative energy.

Read on to learn more about Stephanie Hsu and be inspired by her want for grounding and connection above all else.

In Everything Everywhere you play this brilliant character, Joy who is also (SPOILER) Jobu Tupaki, the central “villain” of the story. I'm just curious, what was your reaction when you first read the script and learned about the character?

So, the Daniels and I met doing an episode of Nora from Queens on Comedy Central. I had just done a Broadway musical called Be More Chill and I had also just wrapped on season three of another show, and I thought I should take a little role on Nora because Bowen Yang was on it at the time (this is before he was on SNL), and he and I did comedy in college together. I knew whatever he was working on must be something super silly and quite frankly stupid for me to do – stupid in a good way. So I ended up doing an episode and my episode happened to be directed by the Daniels. We immediately fell so artistically in love that I basically followed them out to LA. I didn't follow them specifically, but I was inspired to go to LA by them because I thought to myself, I know that there are young creatives like them who I've never met before out there, who I want to make art with. Within a week of me getting to LA, they called me and said, hey, we're working on a film and we think you'd be really great for it, but no pressure. The rest is history.

One common theme that I noticed from your interviews is your passion for creation, right? You just have this immense care for your art and your craft that translates really well into everything that you do. How did you get to that place?

Well, thank you for saying that. It's so funny, last night my friend and I were at this conference and we were all having lots of conversations about art and social justice and at the end of the night, there was a huge dance party. But during the party I was outside having a very interesting conversation with a small group of people. My friend came up to me and she said, every time I walk outside, you're talking to a new little circle. You're totally all about deep talks and having one am chats about dismantling the current outdated systems aren’t you? So yes, I mean I really care. Part of it is because of my mentor, Elizabeth Swados. I met her when I was in school in New York and she took me under her wing, as she did with many people. She was a poet and also a musical theatre writer, but not in the traditional sense at all, very experimental. And she was most famously known for the show she wrote called Runaways.

To write that she talked to runaway teenagers walking the streets of New York and brought them into a room together and they wrote the show to tell their stories and create a space to share what they were doing. The show was never intended to be on Broadway but it ended up gaining critical success in the 70s. So that is the person that was my teacher, that was my mentor and that was my mama. I came up with a community that taught me that the responsibility of art is not to be taken lightly. We are actually here to be of service. And I don't want to just act all the time, I want to be really mindful and I think that comes from if what I do is not making a difference, then I don’t know why I'm doing it. The world is just crazy, it's been crazy. I think I would not be able to leave this planet and leave this place feeling like I just lived it for myself. Maybe because, I don't know, I've always lived this way even when I was a kid.

I like working with artists who take me very seriously and I believe that there are a lot of people who just want the paycheck or want to be famous or whatever. I have no judgment around that but this is a craft and it is an art form. You don't have to study it but you should care. I like working with people who really care because it's important. And last night, Ava DuVernay did a talk with Nina Shaw and Storm Reid and it was three generations of black women talking about being in the industry. And, Ava DuVernay was like, I only want to work with passionate people that dig in because there's no other choice.

How does it feel to be an Asian lead in this still-emerging Asian representation in mainstream media?

It's pretty wild. I feel like I have been one of the few who's gotten to be in every medium as an Asian lead. I never thought that I could be on Broadway, period. Then, I ended up doing two shows back-to-back. In the last show that I did, Be More Chill, I played the female lead in the musical and also the female romantic interest. And she was really weird and crazy and funny. I had never seen Asian representation like that before. So, it's kind of wild and it’s very humbling.

When I was growing up my mother pointed to a television screen when I told her I wanted to be an actor and she said, how could you ever want to do that, there's no way that looks like you. And she was not wrong. We're not there yet and it's still evolving, it's an ongoing thing for sure, yes, but that's why we keep doing art right? To eventually get there, that's the goal. Everybody wants the change to happen as fast as humanly possible, I definitely do, but there is still hope. I worked with James Hong on the film who is 93 years old, and he's been in hundreds of movies. He started acting at a time when people were literally in yellowface while James Hong was acting with them. So, think about the amount of progress that has happened in his lifetime. It's very hopeful with context.

What's your dream project?

Well, what are my dreams? I've said it out loud a few times, I don't usually typically think in singular dreams. That's not how my brain works but one dream that I do have is that I would love to host SNL while Bowen is still at SNL.

If you were a book, what book would you be and why?

It's Adrienne Maree Brown's book Emergent Strategy. She's one of my favorite authors. She's a black, queer, woman who is amazing and a conspirator of change. The first time I ever met her, I hadn't read her book yet, it was years ago, I was brought to her book reading that she was doing at a community book store in the Bronx, and she started speaking about social justice issues and I immediately started crying, I felt like I met my soulmate. I wasn't even ugly crying, tears were just falling down my face. The book is a look at nature and studying the patterns and structures in nature to inspire us to work and relate to one another in a different way. In a way that we have not necessarily been taught to relate to, or value one another. To look at the mushrooms, to look at the moss and see how they grow and understand how that life applies to how we engage. It's also like super squishy, it's such a lovely big-hearted book that if I was so lucky to be a book, that would be the book that I would be.