For “Interior Chinatown” star Jimmy O. Yang, playing an invisible Chinatown extra in the new series hit close to home. That’s because one of Yang’s first roles was “Chinese Teenager #1.”
The irony helped him relate to his character, Willis Wu, and plays out in the series about a struggling Chinatown waiter who is pulled into investigating his brother’s disappearance, airing on Hulu on Tuesday.
“Interior Chinatown,” based on the National Book Award-winning novel of the same name by Charles Yu, is technically a show within a show. The leads — Yang, Chloe Bennet and Ronny Chieng — play “Chinatown” extras within a police procedural called “Black and White.” They are largely ignored by everyone in the procedural until the lights fade and the cameras go away, bringing viewers back to the characters’ Chinatown realities.
In the show’s meta world, Yang is a lead actor playing a background character. His character, Willis, sneaks into “Black and White” by disguising himself as the tech guy and the Chinese food deliveryman, using these stereotypes to his advantage.
“We get put in a box,” Yang said. “They expect you to know kung fu, they expect you to be a good student, or the model minority tech guy.”
For Yang, who has mostly played comedic roles, getting to embody multiple characters at once was creatively rewarding. “I love subverting expectations — that’s what the show is about, and that’s what my career has been about,” Yang said.
He appreciates how the show lifts the curtain on the lives of sidelined characters, and how Chinatown is a metaphor for how he says America flattens certain communities. “We’re shown the facades, the Chinese words, the kitschy restaurants, but what you don’t usually see is behind the scenes,” he said.
Meanwhile, Chieng’s character, Fatty Choi, remains a defender of Chinatown. Though Willis learns to jump between the worlds of “Black and White” and Chinatown, Fatty stubbornly refuses to leave the Chinese restaurant where the two friends work. “(Fatty) represents this idea of not pandering to a white society that doesn’t even see you or want you around,” Chieng said.
Another character who navigates both worlds is Detective Lana Lee, played by Bennet. In “Black and White,” Lee is a biracial cop who is simultaneously treated as a valuable “Chinatown insider” and is constantly dismissed by her counterparts as an outsider. Bennet said as an actor, she paid special attention to the lighting cues, wardrobe and the way Lana carried herself in different contexts. “We were really strategic with when to highlight the fact that I came from both worlds,” Bennet said. “Lana uses that kind of code switching as a way to manipulate and deflect throughout the season.”
Bennet has discussed publicly how Hollywood struggles to understand her biraciality. She said playing a character that embodied her racial frustrations has been a cathartic experience. “I felt so seen by the way Charlie (Yu) wrote her inner dialogue,” Bennet said. “I didn’t realize how much I needed to play her and how much of her story is still so relevant to my life.”
Chieng said that by satirizing Hollywood’s failures, the show makes a point about the larger society we live in. He hopes viewers will walk away with more curiosity about the lives of people behind the scenes. “We need to pay attention to who’s in the background, and recognize them as people who have their own stories, their own tragedies and their own goals,” he said.