Nov 28, 2024 Film & TV
Outside Jess Hong’s suburban Grey Lynn flat is a lavender bush. I recognise it as the source of the dried purple sprig on my bedside table — a small gift Hong presented to me the previous time we’d met. The birds are singing in the middle of winter.
This is the life that belongs to one of two Jess Hongs: the Jess who has returned to Aotearoa to recalibrate and recharge after burnout, living in the same flat she was sharing before she left to film the Emmy-nominated Netflix series 3 Body Problem. This Jess might go to Gogo Music Cafe on Dominion Rd with industry friends after a short-film screening or play Dungeons & Dragons on the weekend with a group of local Asian actors, called Dumplings & Dragons. The other Jess, who glammed up daily at 5am during an exhausting month-long press tour, has been left behind. Temporarily.
“I’m going to do this interview in an American accent, if you don’t mind,” Hong tells me shortly after she walks into the flat. She has an audition later on, for a character who lives in the Salinas Valley, California, in the early 1900s. In fact, she’s been doing auditions — mostly self-tapes — all week, cramming them in after a trip away to visit family in Palmerston North and Lower Hutt. “It’s so fucking classic. There was nothing for ages, and then the one week you go away, there’s four audition requests.”
The first season of 3 Body Problem, the sci-fi series Hong starred in, was released in March. It’s a big-budget extravaganza, now renewed for two more seasons, based on a series of novels by Liu Cixin about a group of scientists confronted with an alien invasion. The adaptation was co-created by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo — Benioff and Weiss were also responsible for the television phenomenon Game of Thrones. The 3 Body production was a big deal, with a reported budget of $20 million per episode for the first eight-episode season, and took the number-one spot in streaming views, globally, for much of its first month. Hong plays Jin Cheng, a theoretical physicist who becomes closely entangled in humanity’s fight against aliens. It is a lead role — number one on the call sheet, even — and the shoot was Hong’s first time filming overseas. In fact, it was her first time visiting Europe at all.
Prior to 3 Body, Hong had done only a handful of local theatre shows, including 48 Nights on Hope Street, The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom and a stint at the Pop-up Globe, as well as some television work on series like Creamerie and Inked — small scale compared to the Netflix machine. She auditioned for 3 Body during the pandemic, in the middle of touring around New Zealand with Duffy in Bubble Trouble, an educational kids show run by the Duffy Books in Homes programme. She remembers shutting herself away in a primary-school rec room in the South Island, doing a chemistry read for the role of Jin Cheng from a child-sized chair. “I hated doing chemistry reads over Zoom,” she says.
Although the stakes were obviously high, Hong found the Duffy show enough of a distraction that she didn’t have time to think, or worry, about how the reads went. About eight or nine digital auditions, meetings and reads later, she got the part.
The Jin Cheng role may be what most people consider a ‘big break’ — it’s in a huge international show, it’s meant Hong has had profiles written about her in Elle and Hollywood Reporter and seen her speak alongside actors such as Giancarlo Esposito at a Los Angeles Times Drama Roundtable — but the actor doesn’t love that framing.
“I think we need to change our relationship to what a ‘break’ means,” Hong says. “We’re all just looking for cool opportunities to work, and be paid for what we love to do, and be recognised for what we do. And I think when people are thinking about a big break… I don’t know. It’s so temporary. These last few years have been amazing, and right now I have more visibility in the world, but that doesn’t last forever.”
Hong’s long-term perspective is apparent as she sips tea, curled up with her feet underneath her, in this flat at the bottom of the world. We are 24 hours from London, where she filmed the show two years ago, and where, very recently, she embarked on the press tour — that scene belongs to the other Jess. Hong’s biggest concern at the moment is which role to play next. “Nobody knows me outside of 3 Body,” she says. “I have, essentially, one credit to my name. So the next thing is either going to solidify my typecast or show people that I can do other stuff.”
Hong hasn’t remained idle — a New Zealand body horror film she starred in, Grafted, premiered at Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival in August — but she’s yet to find a 3 Body follow-up. She is “strategically” requesting roles that are different from Jin Cheng. No scientists, smart people, analytical people or workaholics. No one with a New Zealand accent (the 3 Body team wrote Hong’s accent into the backstory after she was cast). But ideally, she’d like to do an international project of a similar calibre to 3 Body. “I know that if [being typecast] does happen, I should just be grateful that I’m getting work at all, but it would be really cool to do something different.”
Hong is clear-eyed about what her bigger platform means — her Instagram follower numbers climbed rapidly from the low thousands to more than 30,000 on the release of 3 Body — but her hopes are tempered by a modest New Zealand-ness. She wants to capitalise on opportunities while she can and while she’s hot; she cut short a recent holiday to Korea because two events came up in LA at little notice. (One of them was that LA Times roundtable, the other Gold House’s Gold Gala, an annual awards event celebrating Asian Pacific leaders.) “I want to say yes to as many things as I can, even if it does burn me out.”
Though she seems outwardly at peace with where she is now, anxiety remains. It’s possible that Jin Cheng will be the biggest role Hong ever plays.
Hong grew up in Palmerston North, one of three daughters. Her two older sisters, twins, are five years older and “half raised” her, alongside her single mother, who was originally from Guangzhou, China. Like many actors who come out of their shell later in life, Hong was a shy kid, who “played in the garden by [her]self, trying to catch butterflies and talk to the wind”. She documented her expansive inner life in journals that she hid; and due to her social anxiety, she was largely left alone. It was hard to make friends. She ended up writing a lot, mainly poetry and short stories, before stumbling into acting.
“There was a period in my late teens, early 20s, where I couldn’t be alone at all and had to go out. I just fucking hated my own company and so I was constantly seeking external validation everywhere I went. Now I really appreciate my alone time because I actually like myself. That changes everything.” Yoga and meditation became a huge help to her (“I couldn’t afford therapy at the time”). Acting helped, too — offering an intriguing form of therapy, something that occurred to her when she started crying in front of an audience during the reading of a monologue. “I was hooked in a selfish way, because I wanted to use that device as a way to figure out my own stuff.” Hong ended up in Wellington at Toi Whakaari , Aotearoa’s best-known drama school, graduating in 2019. Her time there was mixed — there were not a lot of Asian actors in her year, she says, which sucked — but the acting part stuck.
In an interview with Jenna Wee, the host of the Asian in Aotearoa podcast, Hong introduced herself as “born and raised in the Manawatū… my face is about the most Chinese thing about me.” Despite that, in Tāmaki Hong surrounds herself with a primarily Asian art community, navigating the scene here comfortably and having spent years integrating herself into its networks. If Auckland’s art worlds are small, its Asian art community is even more so. Hong is a prominent face, showing up for theatre openings and supporting friends’ works (sometimes by performing in them).
“There is this thing about being an ‘other’ of any kind. As soon as you’re with a similar other, there are a lot of shortcuts. There’s less explaining of yourself that you need to do. I don’t know, like: you just automatically took your shoes off when you came over. There’s an extra deeper layer that we’re on without having to do anything else.
“That’s something that I did feel when we entered the rehearsal room for [The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom]. I was like, ‘Why am I so comfortable here? Oh, we all get each other immediately.’ Also, they validate your experience. I never really experienced super-outright racism, only the microaggressions, so it felt like I was making it up a lot of the time. I was like, ‘Am I imagining this? What the fuck?’ But, yeah, you’re not. It’s there. So you feel less crazy.”
The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom, a 2022 Silo Theatre production written by Nahyeon Lee, was where I first saw Hong perform. She played several characters, one being a spoiled, good-girl Asian daughter wanting to leave the nest for the first time. The show was born out of a conversation that was recurring at the time in many Asian diaspora communities, both globally and locally — a fed-upness at being made to tell stories about cultural identity to get funding from white people. During the production, Hong and other cast members confronted the many complexities of identity storytelling. “There were days where we didn’t even put anything on the floor, we were just having these really intense discussions and debating.”
Most recently, following the 3 Body press tour, she performed — “because it’s Nathan” — in Nathan Joe’s A Short History of Asian New Zealand Theatre, staged at Auckland’s Basement Theatre and featuring different actors on each night of its run. On her night of the solo production, Hong carried the sold-out show while riding a stationary exercise bike and reading Joe’s script, which was both a lecture about New Zealand’s ‘short history’ of Asian theatre and an expression of his frustrations at being an Asian playwright, as well as adding her own anecdotes. She hadn’t read the script prior to that night, but it fell right in her wheelhouse: the format demanded charisma, a familiarity with Aotearoa’s theatre scene, and existing relationships with its key players. Hong had all three.
During the hour-long performance, she talked about how her first Asian role model was Chye-Ling Huang, one of the co-founders of Proudly Asian Theatre; bantered warmly with an audience full of people she knew; and reiterated her desire that theatre, and stories in general, move away from being solely about identity. When asked to suggest what ‘first’ could be attributed to her, she said, “The first Asian New Zealander to star in a Netflix series without having to speak an Asian language.” The audience cheered loudly.
The source material for 3 Body Problem may be a Chinese series, written by a Chinese author, but the cast of the Netflix series are English speakers from around the globe. Hong tells me the writers purposely didn’t include Chinese for her character — but that she requested some. She used Duolingo to learn Mandarin and got a vocal coach to help with pronunciation. When she couldn’t cotton on to the basics in the way she wanted to, she “fucking cried”. (Her mum, from Guangzhou, speaks Cantonese, and her dad is from Shanghai and speaks Mandarin.)
The broader cast, however, was diverse (“I’m not like the one non-white person”) and Hong feels like identity angles were less prioritised than they are in shows made in New Zealand. Most of the roles Hong is currently auditioning for have colour-blind casting policies (“though in saying that, sometimes you can just tell”), and she says she feels lucky to come up in a time when people want “diaspora stories” — to hear the difference within the difference. “To be honest, because it was on a global stage, the people who remark on my identity are more fascinated by the fact that I’m a New Zealander.”
Although Hong had articulated the binary slicing of the two Jesses to me — the one who does this, the other who does that — they are, of course, the same person. I wonder aloud if the two lives feel separate to her in part because of how ‘different’ New Zealand celebrates success. We are supportive, sure, but tend to react to it in a muted fashion — almost ambivalence.
“It’s really funny, because we were doing hundreds of interviews [a day], and then I came home and it was totally quiet. Like, I do a photoshoot, two interviews, and I go on Mai FM.”
Hong talks about the difference carefully, not letting on that it’s deflating or disappointing, more expressing a shoulder-shrug understanding that this is just how we are. “Tall poppy syndrome exists here, but I haven’t experienced it in a nasty way. It’s not like people are trying to cut you down — it’s more the lack of acknowledgement of success, which is so vital and prioritised somewhere like America, where everything you’ve done is put up on a pedestal.
“The first time I was recognised in New Zealand, I was in Crave [cafe]. There was a girl next to me and she kept glancing over, before she said, ‘Are you from 3 Body Problem? My boyfriend just finished it. Good job.’ And then there’s a moment of silence, and then we both just turn and continue working on our laptops for the rest of the afternoon, and there was no other interaction.” She pauses. “Everyone’s very positive and supportive, but no one is like, [raises voice] ‘Wow!’ I think I’m still bad at taking praise — I don’t like being shown off. So it’s good for me. It’s nice. It’s comfortable.”
Most actors in Aotearoa are private people, Hong says. It feels conceited to talk about one’s self, she says, but she’s getting better at understanding that people do care. “I would like to talk about myself in the context of how I relate to the world and other people.” It’s hard to shake the sense of Kiwi humbleness, though — I notice during our talks that she never steers the conversation towards her experiences filming 3 Body Problem, or what the press tours were like (“You get really good at saying the same answers in different ways”), or any Hollywood celebrity encounters she’s had, unless I bring these things up. (When I do ask the celebrity question, she mentions being randomly invited to Awkwafina’s birthday.) There is no showing off.
By the end of our time together, Hong has fully slipped out of the American accent she’d been falling in and out of during the interview. To save me an Uber, she offers to drop me off at my next destination, so we jump in the car together. I tell her I’ll let her know if I have any questions, or need to factcheck anything. “Yes, please,” she says, wryly. “Google says I’m 27, so everyone writes that I’m 27. I’m not 27. I’m 29.”
Then Jess Hong, 29, puts me out on Karangahape Rd and heads off to another audition.
