‘I couldn’t quiet it any more’: The Season’s Yvonne Chapman on choosing acting over a stable career – interview
The Canadian actress with Hong Kong roots rose to fame in The CW’s Kung Fu and Netflix’s Avatar – next, she’ll be starring alongside Willem Dafoe and Michael Douglas in the film White Lies
Despite more than a decade in the entertainment industry, Yvonne Chapman admits that, even now, she worries that walking away from a stable career in finance to pursue acting was a mistake.
“I’ve never felt secure, ever, in this business,” she says. “I think that’s the nature of it.”
The daughter of immigrant parents and a third culture kid growing up in Canada, Chapman was the model daughter in a traditional Asian household. She did well in school, excelled at her extracurriculars, and wanted to become a doctor – which had been her father’s dream for her.
“I think it is something that’s associated with the Asian upbringing as a child of immigrants. My parents really wanted me to have a stable career, and of course when you think of a stable career, you think of something like a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or an accountant,” she explains.
However, Chapman’s path began to shift during her second year studying bioscience at university, when she realised medicine was not what she wanted for herself. She was terrified to break the news to her parents.
“I went to them crying in the living room,” she says, laughing at the memory. “And my dad was just like, ‘Okay.’ I immediately got mad because he had drilled it into me my whole life that I needed to become a doctor. I was like, ‘What do you mean, okay?’”
She pivoted instead to finance, graduating with a commerce degree from the University of Calgary, and had a stable career in a field she genuinely enjoyed, continuing to study to become a chartered financial analyst. But even then, something was missing.
