For many, receiving an Oscar nomination is an an overwhelmingly emotional experience that validates their entire career. But maybe not for Hong Chau. In an interview with The Independent, Chau said that she feels “nothing” after receiving her first Oscar nomination for her role in Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale this year: “If I can be completely honest, it’s more like, ‘Oh dear.'”
Chau has fair reason to be disillusioned with awards season. Her first bout with awards buzz came after breaking through as Ngoc Lan in 2017’s Downsizing, opposite Matt Damon. Chau recalls everyone telling her she that she was a shoo-in for a nod for her performance as a disabled Vietnamese political activist turned cleaner. But despite being recognized at the Critic’s Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, and the SAG Awards, Chau was snubbed by the Academy Awards, with Phantom Thread‘s Leslie Manville swooping in to nab the slot occupied by Chau for most of awards season.
“Of course, it didn’t happen,” Chau said. “I said to myself, ‘I don’t ever want to go through this again’. So now, when people ask how it feels to be nominated, it’s strange. I really feel nothing. If I can be completely honest, it’s more like, ‘Oh dear’.”
Chau’s apathy towards awards may also stem from her history of working on projects that receive more than their fair share of criticism. She recalls the intense backlash she got for Downsizing, with critics calling her character’s thick Vietnamese accent “a hate crime” and an “icky, racist caricature.” Chau defends Ngoc Lan and her accent choices, calling the criticism “so off base” and suggesting that a lot of the people “who were really harping on the accent” came “from a more privileged background.”
“Nobody went and asked what the ladies who work at the nail salon [thought about it], or the people who worked in the kitchens of all of these restaurants,” said Chau, a daughter of working class Vietnamese immigrants. “Any time you’re getting an opinion about Asian Americans, it’s usually coming from a very wealthy, educated Asian person who has a very different background from what I grew up with. So I’m always going to be on the side of the Asian working class and the poor, and not so much, you know, the Asian person who went to Harvard.”
Like Downsizing, The Whale also has its loud naysayers. Critics of the film, which stars Brendan Fraser as a morbidly obese man in the last days of his life and Chau as his caretaker, have called it out for perceived fatphobia, with GQ pronouncing the movie “a harmful body horror shocker” and The Guardian calling it “crassly fatphobic.” (VF’s own Richard Lawson agreed, saying the film peddles “a kind of leering horror.”) In her interview with the Independent, Chau says that Arronofsky took great pains to be as sensitive about the topic as possible, consulting a “think tank of experts” including the Obesity Action Coalition about specific moments in the film. “We know on our end how we felt about it,” says Chau regarding The Whale. “But I think it doesn’t hurt to also listen to people who’ve been frustrated with [Hollywood’s] depiction of obesity. How they feel about it is totally valid. You can be proud of it and be open to criticism.”
Despite her knack for picking controversial projects, Chau’s future in the industry looks bright. Beyond her Oscar nod, she recently starred as the tortilla-serving Elsa in Mark Mylod‘s hit film The Menu and recently appeared in episode three of Peacock’s Pokerface. Looking ahead, she’s got films lined up with auteurs like Kelly Reichardt, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Wes Anderson. While she may be ambivalent about awards, she’s still excited about the work. “The work is coming in organically,” she tells the Independent. “I love that it’s happening that way.”
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