This summer, Sandra Oh stood behind a lectern at a graduation ceremony in New Hampshire, preparing to give university-leavers words of hope at a time
This summer, Sandra Oh stood behind a lectern at a graduation ceremony in New Hampshire, preparing to give university-leavers words of hope at a time of permacrisis. She rose to the challenge, opening up about her past battles with depression and anxiety, before making a heartfelt case for embracing discomfort and kindness “so we can meet cruelty again and again and not lose our humanity”. This was increasingly significant, she explained, when many world leaders “claim power through fear and oppression”. And then came the moment that would go viral. Oh instructed everyone to stand up and do something Cristina Yang, her career-making character on Grey’s Anatomy, used to do when times got tough. “Dance it out!” she exhorted as David Guetta’s Titanium washed over the crowd. “Remember this feeling!”
“I was very, very, very nervous about it,” says Oh. “I worked really hard.” She had been putting herself into the mindset of 20-year-olds not just worried about their own futures but about the larger picture. “The world is burning!” she says, imagining their shadowy thoughts. “There’s wars all over! My heart is so heavy, so all I’m going to do is doomscroll.” But, crucially, Oh wanted her audience to find their way to joy – thus the dancing. “Sitting there trying to bear the pain in the world,” she says, neatly summing up the philosophy she shared that day, “will help you figure out how to be in the world.”
There are now T-shirts emblazoned the words Oh said at the Emmys: ‘It’s an honour just to be Asian’
That speech – with its vulnerability and compassion, its awareness of the world’s cruelties while still finding moments of joy – feels particularly on-brand for Oh. Born near Ottawa to Korean immigrant parents, the actor, whose star turns in Grey’s Anatomy and Killing Eve made her the first Asian woman to win multiple Golden Globes, has since gained fans for her fierce support of wider representation in the industry. There are now popular T-shirts emblazoned with the words Oh famously said at the Emmys: “It’s an honour just to be Asian.”
Multiple awards … with Jodie Comer in Killing Eve. Photograph: David Emery/BBC America
Warm and sparkling, her own speech today is filled with plenty of laughs. “Hold on baby!” is the first thing I hear as she speaks to me by phone from New York, playing for time as she tries and fails to turn on her camera. But Oh soon becomes more reflective, prone to lengthy pauses as she talks about everything from the climate emergency to AI to racial equality.
Fittingly, Oh’s latest project – the indie Canadian sci-fi film Can I Get a Witness? – is about finding salvation amid the burning. After an apocalyptic, AI-engineered disaster hits Earth in the very deliberately chosen year of 2025, human life has been rebuilt. It’s 2040: peace has been achieved. Offices, computers and smartphones are relics of a damned civilisation. People spend their days tending to their gardens. But there are conditions: they don’t travel, electricity is restricted and – the biggest catch – everyone must die a government-mandated death at 50. Oh plays Ellie, a survivor of the 2025 catastrophe, who is supporting her daughter into her recent job as a “documenter” of these “end of life” ceremonies. These can be picked from a brochure, with options including church memorials and beachside goodbyes with champagne.
When your primary source of love is the phone, something is happening to you at an unconscious, very powerful level
“I was most interested in the script’s contemplation of dying,” says Oh, in particular how the knowledge of one’s impending death would change one’s approach to life. It’s an increasingly urgent question, Oh says, recalling an early screening last year in Santa Barbara while wildfires raged across Los Angeles. It brought home the idea that the film is not really about the future. “It is what’s happening right now,” she says. “We are in the burning right now.”
When they were making the film, Oh asked director and writer Ann Marie Fleming to include AI in the script. How does she think technology is changing our lives? “Phones and social media,” she says, “are retraining human beings. When your primary source of love is the phone, something is happening to you at an unconscious, very powerful level.”
Her own solution to this retraining – “I’m already struggling, and I didn’t grow up with this technology” – is choosing to do “small, profoundly meaningful” films such as this latest one, as well as theatre. She has been playing Olivia in Twelfth Night at the Delacorte in New York’s Central Park. “I’m engaging with 2,000 people in an open-air theatre. You can feel people really want to come to the show to laugh, have a good time, for it to be joyous, out in nature. You’re in community and you’re communing – through Shakespeare.” In the age of the machine, “such true human interactions become way more important”.
Search for salvation … Can I Get a Witness? Photograph: Ed Araquel
Oh talks a lot about making conscious choices, vigorous decisions. “This is the gift of midlife,” says the actor, who has just turned 54. “There is so much in culture, in society, that you’ve been living in unconsciously. But you see that crack of light coming through – and realise that’s what you want to follow. I think that’s what midlife is about. And it’s very engaging.”
Oh has also spoken about unlearning the racism she internalised from her early years, singling out a wounding experience with an agent when she arrived in LA in 1995. The agent advised her to go back to Canada as there weren’t any opportunities for Asian actors in the US. Decades later, on receiving the Killing Eve script, Oh couldn’t work out which supporting part was intended for her. “Honey,” her agent said. “It’s Eve.”
In recent years, Oh has put her considerable heft into stories from the Asian diaspora, acting in Domee Shi’s Pixar romp Turning Red, Iris Shim’s intergenerational horror Umma, and Jessica Yu’s family comedy Quiz Lady. She’s also played secretary Sofia Mori in Vietnam war drama The Sympathiser and frazzled academic Ji-Yoon Kim in Netflix series The Chair. All these roles, unlike the ones that made her eminent, specifically consider her character’s heritage in the script.
“I remember being at the Oscars when Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the awards,” she says. “It was so important. To build something, you need a larger community – to get traction, to get the experience, to know how to support each other. When I started, actors like Daniel Dae Kim or John Cho – we’d known each other for ever, but we never shared a stage or set, because we were always on our own. It’s still a tough industry, veering towards, honestly, a patriarchal white mainstream.”
Frazzled academic … Oh in The Chair. Photograph: Eliza Morse/AP
Diversity, equity and inclusion may be under attack today, but Oh believes in them wholeheartedly. “I find the people who vilify it, or are scared of it, are very, very questionable.” She hopes that for Asian-Americans in Hollywood, “the door that’s opened in the past 10 years – or not even that – seven years – remains open. And enough of us have passed through, and gained a foothold, to make projects that will bring others through.”
It’s a useful segue to the question I’ve been burning to ask. “You said one of my favourite quotes of all time,” I tell her. “Oh god,” she replies. “What is it?”
Two years ago, the New Yorker asked Oh about the comparatively fewer opportunities she’s had from white male directors and major studios. “It’s like being able to get over a bad boyfriend,” she responded. “They’re not going to call. Just move on and hang out with the young women who want you to be their mom.”
“Did I say that?” Oh laughs in disbelief. “Can you tell me the quote again?” I repeat it. “Well,” she says, recovering a little. “That’s a simple way of saying, ‘Go where you’re wanted.’”
To prove the point, she reels off the names of the various creators behind her biggest breaks: Shonda Rhimes with Grey’s Anatomy, Phoebe Waller-Bridge with Killing Eve, Amanda Peet with The Chair, Park Chan-wook with The Sympathiser. One exception, she says, is Robert Wuhl, who cast her in sports agent sitcom Arliss, one of her first major roles in LA. It did not lead to a stampede. Or as Oh puts it: “The old white patriarchy hasn’t knocked on my door yet!” Then she adds: “I’m glad I said that quote now. I said it because it’s like – where am I going to put my power? I’m going to put it in the young women who see something in me.”
This summer, at a live podcasting event in New York, Oh read aloud from her elderly diary, with entries that stretch all the way back to childhood. One, written right after her upsetting meeting with the LA agent, goes: “The pain’s the same and overwhelming and you try not to take it so personally or cosmically, but you feel it. Nothing she could think of to send me out on? Nothing? There’s nothing there for me? Why am I here?”
What would she say to that past self now? “I’m so sorry it’s so painful right now,” she says, her voice full of tenderness. “But it will change. I’m not saying you’ll get everything you think you want. And I know you have no idea how it’s going to change.” Oh pauses, gathers her thoughts. “That lesson on how things will change,” she says. “The impermanence of things. It’s hard to figure that out. I think that takes a lifetime.”
Can I Get a Witness? is in UK cinemas from 19 September
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