Sandra Oh, star of Netflix's 'The Chair,' craved comedy after darkness of 'Killing Eve'
Sandra Oh finally has a seat at the table. More specifically, a chair.
The "Killing Eve" and former "Grey's Anatomy" star sits in the Netflix comedy series "The Chair" (streaming Friday) as Ji-Yoon Kim, the new chair of the English department at fictional Pembroke University. While yes, it is a comedy, Ji-Yoon faces drama as the first female to hold the position and one of only a few employees of color at the university.
Oh grew hungry for a comedy after playing MI-5 agent Eve Polastri on BBC America's "Killing Eve," which she says took a psychological toll.
"What Ji-Yoon goes through is not light at all, but I thought the circumstances were friendlier," she says, laughing from London, where she's shooting the fourth and final season of "Eve."
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Her college tenure spirals out of control: She needs to cut three professors from her staff, and the prime candidates fear they're being pushed out; her love interest and colleague Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass) angers students after his misguided Nazi salute in class; and she's struggling to connect with her adoptive daughter JuJu (Everly Carganilla). "The Chair" comes from co-creators Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman.
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You could have predicted problems would mount minutes into the first of six episodes, when her new office chair literally falls apart and takes her down with it – a "beautiful, perfect metaphor," Oh says.
That scene was the first she shot – meaning the pressure was more than on.
"I had to hit that comedy beat," she says. "And I feel like we got there."
Oh, 50, slips between comedy and drama easily – falling out of said chair in that first scene and shedding quiet tears the next – which she says mirrors reality.
"You might be in a crazy argument with your partner," she says, "and then someone does an expression and you both start laughing. But that's closer to life."
Oh questions whether she was a great English student herself, though she nearly pursued journalism instead of acting in college. She connects the closer-than-you'd-think dots between both aspirations: "Obviously, what I do is fiction, and journalism is nonfiction, (but) there's a similar drive to uncover and discover things."
She also pores over poetry, hunting down poems for each project, year, or section of her life. One she discovered recently is "Our Real World" by Wendell Berry.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Perhaps Oh's "real work" and "real journey" is her activism. She delivered a passionate speech at a "Stop Asian Hate" protest in Pittsburgh last March, amid a startling increase of hate crimes and killings of Asian Americans. Acting also serves as an outlet for her activism, she says. She also encourages people to watch "The Chair" as a means of solidarity.
"To be able to play a character, that is hopefully, an honest portrayal of a person, a woman, a woman of color, a woman of color who is at a certain position in her life, a single mom, someone who's trying to be a good daughter, and then maybe have a romance with a friend and keep her institution going, is my activism," she says.
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Ji-Yoon's Korean identity plays a pivotal role in the series, and acutely in her relationship with her Mexican daughter.
"I felt like Ji-Yoon, as the person that she is, would absolutely be integrating her child's ethnicity and try to expose her child to not only her own culture, the mother's culture, but the child's culture of origin," she says.
Ji-Yoon faces heartbreak as she fails to connect with her independent and precocious child. But that changes when she discovers JuJu's ofrenda – a Mexican altar for "The Day of the Dead," which usually features marigolds, candles, food and pictures of dead loved ones – which she makes for a school project. It features pictures of Ji-Yoon's late mother, and she can't help but cry when she sees it.
Yet Oh can't help but laugh when reflecting on another administrative role from her past: Vice Principal Gupta in "The Princess Diaries," for which she "has such a soft spot in my heart." In the 2001 film, she fawns over Queen Clarisse Renaldi (Julie Andrews), the grandmother of royal student Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway), after she unexpectedly shows up in Gupta's office.
"It was a very beautiful experience," she says, giddy that the scene sticks in people's memories. "And to see that one scene actually translated and had life beyond, it really pleases me."
The future looks more beautiful for Oh: She celebrated her birthday last month with friends Awkwafina ("Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings") and director Jessica Yu ("In Treatment"), who both happened to be in London at the time.
"Great way to usher in your 50s, baby, I (have to) tell you," she says. "It's good, it's good."
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Sandra Oh on Netflix's 'The Chair,' 'Killing Eve' and Asian hate
