Jimmy O. Yang Has Always Had Main Character Energy

Last time I saw the actor and comedian Jimmy O. Yang, we were in Koreatown in L.A., sharing a steaming hot bowl of spicy kalguksu with his venture capitalist girlfriend Brianne Kimmel and his TikTok whiz of an assistant William Pepper.

We had just come from a shoot for a GQ Hype cover story that was meant to mark a turning point in Yang’s career. Fresh off his latest comedy special for Prime Video, he was set to make his jump to the top of the call sheet as the star of the much-anticipated Interior Chinatown, the series adaptation of Charles Yu’s National Book Award-winning novel about Hollywood, the Asian-American experience and and the roles we all find ourselves playing in life.

“I want to do something that's meaningful to me, to the community, something that's subverting expectations,” he wrote in an email to his agents, a few months before landing the Interior Chinatown audition. “I want to kick ass in something without anybody laughing. I want to die in something without it being funny.” Yang was still best known for playing Jìan-Yáng, a heavily-accented comic-relief character on the HBO series Silicon Valley; Interior Chinatown was finally a chance to break out of the box Hollywood had put him in.

But a few weeks after that afternoon in K-Town, Interior Chinatown shut down. A series of labor disputes—first, the Writers Guild of America in May and then the SAG-AFTRA strike in November— had effectively paralyzed Hollywood. It was a moment of reckoning for an industry grappling with impending technological advancements and a swiftly-changing world. And it meant Yang’s big breakthrough would have to wait.

Last week, I circled up with Yang again—this time, over Zoom—from the Hollywood Hills home where we did that first interview. He’s spent a year and a half “just anticipating and anxiously waiting for the show to come out.”

A lot has changed since we last spoke. “First of all, Bri and I broke up a while back,” he says. “Put that in the story please, because on Wikipedia it says we’re still in a relationship.” (For that GQ Hype story, I spent a lot of time with the couple. “I mean, I'm Ukrainian,” Kimmel told me at one point, offering up a metaphor for why the pair worked so well together. “I hand-make dumplings as well.”)

“I’m like, ‘How do we fucking take this off?’” Yang says, with a laugh. “They're like, ‘Well, you got to say it in interviews.’ So please write it in and then they can reference it on Wikipedia.”

Mike Taing/Courtesy of Hulu

But while the best-laid plans often go awry, some things have gone as expected. Interior Chinatown finally came out last month, to the kind of pre-release fanfare typically reserved for Hollywood’s marquee names—and rave reviews that have announced Yang’s arrival as an actor who can lead projects. “An endearing and believably jaded protagonist,” trumpeted The Guardian. “Captivating and likable from his very first frame,” said Indiewire.

When we spoke last year, Charles Yu told me that finding the lead for Interior Chinatown felt like finding a unicorn. “For him to be as known as he is, as talented as he is, and yet not have had a role like this,” Yu said. “And these other qualities of an everyman in some ways, who has this internal confidence and this thing that you want to root for in an actual hero. He is, as described [in the book], a leading man who doesn't know it yet.”

The genre-bending, ultra-meta Chinatown follows Yang’s character Willis Wu, a waiter in a Chinese restaurant who feels like a background character in his own life, both literally and figuratively. After accidentally witnessing a crime in Chinatown, he unwittingly finds himself stepping into the spotlight, partnering with local investigators to solve a case and inadvertently unraveling a web of secrets. The series feels at turns like a police procedural, a kung-fu movie, a family drama and a workplace comedy, and as the center of the series, Yang is routinely asked to perform a highwire act, alternately funny and dramatic, humble and heroic.

In an interesting scene early in the season, Willis contends with a mysterious force that keeps him outside the police building, unable to participate in a police investigation he knows he has a lot to contribute to. In the scene, Yang uses the physical, slapstick comedy he’s long shown a mastery of—in comedies like Silicon Valley and Space Force— this time, in order to convey something dramatic.

“Everything I've ever done has given me the skill set to be in Interior Chinatown,” Yang tells me. “Back in the day, it was the lack of opportunity. I was just so excited and determined—even if I was just Person in Line on Two Broke Girls or Chinese Teenager Number One on Agents of Shield. That felt like the holy grail.”

“That's why in a way, it's touching and maybe heartbreaking at times [to play this role],” he continues. “He is willing to risk his life and everything in order to just get that little bit of a crumb…. I always saw Willis almost as a teenager in the beginning, and then he kind of grows and progresses. He has just that fire in his belly. He's not going to just let the door slam and go home. That's what makes him a hero. Although he is a background actor, he has that determination to keep going, keep trying.”

Mike Taing/Courtesy of Hulu

An interesting aspect about the series is how Charles Yu, Taika Waititi and the rest of the crew weave in aspects of the Asian and Asian-American film canon in different ways, making explicit that they’re making something in dialogue with—and indebted to—what came before.

During the moment Willis first meets detective Lana Lee, for example, his immediate infatuation is made apparent in a black-and-white scene where the image begins stuttering in Wong Kar-wai fashion—borrowing the iconic Dina Washington “What A Difference A Day Makes” needledrop from Chungking Express to make the homage explicit. “It was definitely inspired by that,” Yang says. “Of course, me growing up in Hong Kong, that’s my guy. When we were shooting some of those scenes, Taika was playing the Faye Wong version of the Cranberries song [“Dreams” that was used in Chungking Express].”

Lauren Tom, an actress best known for her role in the 1993 classic The Joy Luck Club, that watershed of Asian-American cinema, appears on the show as a prickly real estate agent Willis’ mom (played by Diana Lin) both envies and admires. In a 2018 New York Times article on the 25th anniversary Joy Luck Club, Tom talked about life after the movie’s supposed breakthrough: “A lot of my friends who were white, and were the same age and a similar type, they would get called in,”she said of film auditions, “but my agent could not get me in the room.” Eventually, she found more stable work in voice acting.

“She's such a legend,” Yang says, “especially in our community. She's so good. She's like a villain almost against Diana too. You see these two legendary actors going at it. It's cool to see that.”

When Yang and his Crazy Rich Asians co-stars were promoting that film in 2018, much was made about how it was a long-overdue breakthrough for Asian-Americans in Hollywood. But as that New York Times story warned, those were the same promises the industry made after Joy Luck Club.

Thankfully, since then, audiences—and the industry—have made it clear that Asian-American stories in Hollywood are here to stay, from streaming hits like Beef and Shogun to award-winning films like Everything Everywhere All At Once and Past Lives.

“I think what's really cool about Interior Chinatown is, of course, it's an Asian story—there's a lot of themes about invisibility and what it means to be Asian in this country,” he says. “But at the end of the day, it's a really creative show, unlike anything you've seen. We took big swings. I think it shows the evolution of Asian-American [film and TV], now we're able to take big swings. We can now take risks, be creative.”

Mike Taing/Courtesy of Hulu

It’s clear just how much Interior Chinatown has emboldened Yang, in his personal life but also in his craft as a standup comedian. Right now, he’s in the middle of a sold-out standup comedy tour, playing major venues like Carnegie Hall in New York and the Kia Forum in L.A., developing new material for a future special. For Good Deal and Guess How Much?, his last two comedy specials, he sold the concepts first, taking the money and rushing to refine the material to meet deadlines; this time, he’s prioritizing his own enjoyment first, going on the road because he wants to. “I feel like it's a different level I'm doing it at,” he says. “Just being a little more confident, comfortable.”

“So much was riding on every set back in the day,” he continues. “You don't know—maybe a Fox executive is sitting there, maybe a casting director’s sitting there, so you want to kill it every set. But that's not the right mentality you should be in when you build material. You should be able to take chances and bomb. I think now maybe I have the luxury—or at least the mentality of [having the luxury] to do that. I'm doing it for myself now. I'm doing it because I love it.”

The whole time Yang and I are talking, I’m distracted by a sculpture on the bookshelf behind him. To me, it looked like a baby elephant tusk on a wooden base—the kind of elegant if seemingly meaningless ornament one might see in a celebrity home tour. Could our boy Jimmy—deliverer of dick jokes, the onetime @funnyasianguy, our Jian Yang—be going all Hollywood on us?

“It’s from Space Force, from the episode I wrote!” he explains. He grabs the sculpture and lets me take a good look at…. a dick? Some things never change.

“It’s a penis,” he confirms, brandishing it like a trophy. “Not mine, though!”