[This story contains spoilers for episode four of The Sympathizer, “Give Us Some Good Lines.”]
You hear about James Yoon before you meet him. The fourth episode of The Sympathizer, HBO and A24’s limited series adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel, is an interlude from the usual business of spycraft as The Captain (Hoa Xuande) is dispatched by his CIA contact (Robert Downey Jr.) to serve as a cultural consultant for a Vietnam War movie from a hotheaded auteur (also played by Downey). While telling Lana (Vy Le) about the film, The Captain says that James Yoon is in the cast. Lana doesn’t recognize the name, but The Captain says she’ll know him when she sees him: He’s the guy that Hollywood turns to whenever there’s an Asian role.
That’s why it almost feels like an Easter egg when James Yoon appears a few scenes later, played by John Cho in a surprise cameo alongside David Duchovny as the method-acting lead who refuses to break character, to the nervousness of everyone on set. Cho, of course, was throughout the early 2000s one of the few actors of Asian descent to land substantive parts in Hollywood, even literally becoming the poster child for Asian American representation in the viral social media campaign “Starring John Cho.”
Cho spoke with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss his casting, how he relates to the episode’s skewering of Hollywood (especially its treatment of Asian actors and characters) and the impression Xuande made on him when they first worked together a couple of years prior.
How did you get involved with this project?
It was through director Park [Chan-wook, who co-showran alongside Don McKellar]. We have known one another just socially, we never worked together but we met over 15 years ago, something like that. He’s just someone I’ve admired for a long, long time, and so that was an easy yes.
Given what James Yoon’s journey represents in Hollywood, do you find your casting to be meta?
I certainly think there’s a way to read it as that. But for me, I was thinking about the generation or two before me, and that seemed to be a better match in terms of the social mood of the time and how that person would have been treated off and on the set. In my mind, it was more of an ode to the people that preceded me, that were my mentors. A lot of the Asian American actors that I was first introduced to were primarily theater actors who didn’t pay all the bills through film and television. Those were the people I was thinking about. But absolutely, I can see it, especially if you’re young, and maybe Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is maybe the first time you were kind of aware of an Asian American presence onscreen. So I certainly see that someone could think that.
Could you relate to any of the ideas satirized in this episode?
What I can relate to in the James Yoon character, our connection point, is that he was trying to do the very best with this role that he had. What he wasn’t doing was critiquing the bigger picture. Maybe today I might be more prone to, say, look at a script and go, “Whereas textually this character is not offensive or demeaning at all, in context depicting this person doesn’t make any sense anymore or is inaccurate or therefore the very positioning of the story itself maybe is suspect or possibly racist.” I can certainly relate to that character, James, [not] doing that. That’s the way we had to think. To some extent, I’m still living it.
You actually had already worked with Hoa Xuande, when he was a supporting actor on Cowboy Bebop. Hoa said that on that set, he was inspired by the way you treated others and aspired to be the kind of leader you were if he were ever number one on the callsheet. Who knew that would happen just a couple of years later?
Yeah, what the hell?! (Laughs) So many Asian Americans of my generation, we grew up in sort of all-white circumstances, and especially the men, I felt like we all had this “ lesser-than” thing that we had to deal with for our adolescence, and we had to figure out a way to deal with that weight of being “less than” as we grew into adults. When I became an actor and moved to L.A., I met all these dudes from Hawaii and they really opened my mind because they walked taller. They seemed fundamentally different, and I was so fascinated by them and as I thought about it, it’s because they grew up in a majority Asian culture, probably, and so they’re wired differently. And in a gentler, very subtle way, I felt that immediately with Hoa. He grew up in Australia, so I’m assuming he didn’t grow up in a majority Asian neighborhood but he still had a little bit of that flavor. Or maybe it’s that he’s a surfer, so there is that balance and grace that makes you walk different. But anyway, my impression with him was, like, This is new blood. I like this attitude, and he was a good actor — not that in that role you could see the total breadth of what someone can do — but I was like, Oh, I’m very fascinated by him, and I like him. You never know how far someone can go based on something like that, but I was like: Post it. [Mimes jotting down a Post-it note.] But I just liked him a lot right off the bat and I think I was attracted to his energy.
James Yoon’s storyline centers on his big torture scene. A lot is made of David Duchovny’s character being method, but James Yoon is the one who chooses to stay on the torture rack through the lunch break and pushes himself to the point of vomiting. That sounds like a very pointed choice, a deliberate statement about the sacrifice required of actors who maybe don’t get this kind of opportunity every day. But what do you make of it?
It does correlate to the level of power one has on a set. I’m not an educated actor and I don’t know what going full method really entails, but there is a way to keep yourself in things that you do privately, and then there’s a way that when you’re in character, you actively interfere with other people’s working methods. And one person in that storyline was abusive and selfish in the way that he worked. And there’s another actor whose working methods might be similar but crucially was not abusive and did not interfere with the way other people worked. Who can afford to not cooperate with the rest of the cast and crew, and who, in order to keep their job, must cooperate?
I guess that’s one connection point between 1970s sets and 2024.
A little bit (Laughs).
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