Jimmy O. Yang gets personal in his first lead role as Interior Chinatown’s Willis Wu
Interior Chinatown’s Yang, a migrant from Hong Kong as a teen who worked his way up via bit-part roles, says he connected with his character
To help him prepare for his role as an overlooked Asian-American everyman in Interior Chinatown, Jimmy O. Yang bought a US$1,500 used Toyota Corolla and drove it around Los Angeles.
It was, to put it mildly, a lemon.
The driver’s side door did not work. There were no power windows. The brakes were so shot that he once struggled to stop in time and bumped into a Tesla whose owner was irate – until he recognised Yang and asked to get cast in one of his shows.
But the most telling encounter, says Yang, was when he pulled up to the studio gate and the guard on duty refused to let him on the lot.
“I’m No. 1 on the call sheet and she would not give me the time of day. She was like, ‘Pull over, call whoever got you in here. If you can’t, you gotta go’ – she was so rude to me because I was in this car,” the actor-writer-comedian recalls.
The experience gave Yang a sense of how people tend to dismiss Asian-Americans, especially those who exist on the economic margins. “It’s sad, and it informed a lot of my decisions on the show,” he says.
