Chinese-American actress Joan Chen on Hollywood, China and ‘English’, her third film as director
- Chen praises Hollywood for trying more than other national film industries to be inclusive, but says the result is sometimes more superficial than authentic
- The 57-year-old is currently wrapping up ‘English’, set in China, and says that her home country’s film industry is a ‘great market now’
It must be fun being Joan Chen in this day and age.
Nearly three decades after establishing herself as a leading Chinese-American star, with projects including Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning epic The Last Emperor and David Lynch’s cult television series Twin Peaks, she is finally seeing diversity and representation become the talk of Hollywood – talk that partly fuelled the success of Crazy Rich Asians in the US and which is giving hope to aspiring Asian talent everywhere.
It is slightly less than four decades after she was named best actress at the Hundred Flowers Awards – China’s equivalent of the Oscars – for her role in Youth (1977), her second film role. But the Shanghai-born, San Francisco-based Chen is still finding opportunities to blossom in China at a time when even Hollywood veterans are tempted there by big bucks.
The 57-year-old actress and director is currently wrapping up her third directing effort, a Chinese production named English. “I’m very fortunate that it isn’t hard for me to come back [and work in China]. I have the best of both worlds,” she tells the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong this month, where she served as jury president for the 13th Asian Film Awards.
Though she feels opportunities for Asians are still limited in Hollywood, she acknowledges that it has improved – to a degree.
“I think Hollywood is, by far, the most conscious of any other national industry to try to be inclusive. But sometimes it’s superficial. Sometimes it’s a matter of making seven action heroes into seven different colours. It’s not about truthful experiences or authentic experiences,” she says.