Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Stephanie Hsu: ‘I can’t control what’s woke to talk about’ – iNews

In the early months of the pandemic, Stephanie Hsu found herself standing in front of a bookshelf, weeping. I realised, says the 31-year-old, that all these writers had taken the time to write these books to keep us company [in a way] that they didnt even know we would need. They didnt even foresee the type of huge life change that many of us went through. And yet they felt a pull to finish a story. There was something very profound about that moment, where I felt the weight and the presence of art.

Hsu is telling me this in an attempt to explain what it meant to her to play a multiverse-destroying, dildo-nunchuck-wielding supervillain in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Honestly, this movie is everything that I could possibly want from a work of art, she says. It is mind-expanding, medium-expanding, and it provides immense amounts of healing. And that is all I ever want art to do. That, she adds, and to make the world a better place.

If that sounds like a big ask, Everything Everywhere Hsus first ever studio film and a surprise runaway hit at the US box office is up to it. Written and directed by the writing-directing duo known as the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) who previously cast Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse in Swiss Army Man it is an absurd, profound, ludicrously ambitious film that takes on the very meaning of life, goodness and the universe while also being stupidly good fun.

The film follows Michelle Yeohs Evelyn, a frazzled Chinese-American laundromat owner who is being audited by a cantankerous tax inspector (Jamie Lee Curtis, clearly having a ball). Meanwhile, her downtrodden daughter Joy (Hsu) is trying, and failing, to get her mother to welcome her girlfriend into the family.

Here is where things get weird. Through a series of improbable events that would be as frustrating to explain as a dream, it transpires that this is just one of infinite multiverses, and Evelyn must jump between them, experiencing every possible version of herself, in order to stop an existential threat known as Jobu Tupaki, who turns out to be her daughter Joy from a different multiverse, whose mind has splintered into something godlike and vengeful.

Oh, and theres a black-hole bagel, a world in which everyone has hot-dog fingers, and an extended joke involving the Pixar film Ratatouille.

It could have been atrocious, but, says Hsu, I think the first thing that I said out loud when I watched the final cut was: It works. It really works.

Hsu is on a video call from her kitchen in Los Angeles. It is 8am there, a time at which she is not usually ready to be talking to people, she says with a laugh. Hsu is not quite a newcomer she played Mei Lin in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and had a blink-and-youll-miss-it role in Marvels Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings but this role is surely her star-making one. She is brilliant, embodying a swaggering nihilism one minute, a repressed vulnerability the next.

Hsu loves that Everything Everywhere is not centred on our identities, she says. Its so wild and singular. This is not a film about race, nor queerness, yet they are woven into its very fabric. I know there are people who are going to see the movie with their families, and the movies so crazy that maybe they wont even talk about the queer relationship, but its there. And that is significant.

She gently pushes back, though, when I compare it to those Marvel and Disney offerings that offer gestures towards progressiveness without actually taking any risks. I think that every attempt, if it is done with care, chips away at the same stone, she says carefully.

Take that Pride flag pinned to the jacket of one of the characters in the new Doctor Strange film. The beauty of a big-budget film that can sneak that in, says Hsu, is if that somehow doesnt get noticed by certain governments and it gets approved, thats a huge deal.

Everything Everywhere has been banned from release in countries such as Saudi Arabia; Doctor Strange has not. The people who need to see that little Pride flag are going to see it, and that can be enough to carry something through, you know?

There was a time when Hsu might have thought differently but she has been telling herself lately that when it comes to social progress, she can only do so much. Because theres so much that I cannot control: how the pendulum swings in culture, what is woke to talk about in media, and how people like to capitalise on identity for reasons that are not necessarily pure, she explains. So what helps me is to slow down and to understand that progress is nuanced. At the very end of the day, I have to have hope.

She mentions James Hong, the 93-year-old actor who plays her grandfather, Gong Gong, in Everything Everywhere. Hes getting his Hollywood star tomorrow; hes been in more than 500 movies, and he started working at a time where people were in yellow face. They wouldnt cast any Asian people. When I think about that, embodied in one persons lifetime, it helps me to understand that what I am dreaming of is going to take time.

Things werent easy for Hsu, either. When she was growing up in California, her mother, who had moved to the US from Taiwan as a teenager, pointed at the TV screen and told her there was no way she could be an actor, because no one on there looked like her. When she got the script for Mrs Maisel, she was scared of the jokes that I might find on the page slanty eyes, broken English, she wrote in a piece for The Hollywood Reporter. Her fears were unfounded, but given what she had grown up watching, not unwarranted.

So what does slowing down mean exactly? Well There is a long pause. When I was younger, I would feel really angry when change was not happening at the pace I wanted it to. And it would enrage me to the point where I would lose my capacity for compassion. Ever the careful conversationalist, she umms and ahhs for a moment about whether to bring something up. Eventually, she decides with a laugh that it is worth it. Roe v Wade, she says. That is so enraging.

We are speaking just a few days after a leaked memo revealed that the US Supreme Court plans to overturn the legalisation of abortion in America. It is so enraging for so many reasons, continues Hsu. And the thing is, I dont know the answer. So even though I am so enraged now, I am also, I think, being a little more honest with feeling like I dont have all the answers.

Perhaps what I mean by slowing down is feeling incredibly determined about trying to move things forward, but also giving myself space to be unclear of how to make it better.

It can be tiring, I say, to have to constantly justify your own rights and existence. Well, totally, says Hsu. Im very tired of saying no all the time. Naomi Klein wrote this book, No is Not Enough, and she says that if were just debating all the time, trying to take the man down, fighting, that is not enough. There has to be a yes that we can all get behind. To set a fire takes a shorter amount of time than to grow a new possibility.

She has also discovered, thanks to Everything Everywhere, that there can be a place for nihilism in the world. Up until this movie, Id been trying to find meaning and beauty and synchronicities, and a feeling that youre connected to something larger than yourself fate, in some ways, she explains. But that can be very debilitating, because its a confusing time to be alive right now. I dont know why there was Covid. Theres no way to put meaning to any of these things that are happening. And nihilism takes the pressure off a little bit. We know nothing. We simply do not know what is coming our way, nor how to solve the current batch of problems.

She laughs. We are all small and stupid. But maybe thats OK. Maybe we are all just trying our very best.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is in cinemas now

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Everything Everywhere All At Once's Stephanie Hsu: 'I can't control what's woke to talk about' - iNews