Stephanie Hsu, the guest of this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a tremendously gifted young actress who seems to keep popping up and doing extraordinary work in stage and screen projects that everyone winds up talking about.
Consider Hsu’s output put over just the last five years: on Broadway, she starred in the musicals SpongeBob SquarePants, which tied with Mean Girls as the most Tony-nominated show of 2018, and then in the cult favorite Be More Chill; on TV, she played me Joel Maisel‘s post-Midge love interest on the third and fourth seasons of Amazon’s Emmy-winning comedy series The Marveous Mrs. Maisel (and will presumably be back for its fifth and final season later this year); and in 2022 she made her feature film debut opposite Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan playing Joy, the queer American daughter of Chinese immigrants who desperately wants her mother to accept her for who she is — and who, in some alternate universes, is a nihilist chaos agent named Jobu Tupaki — in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Everything Everywhere is now the highest-grossing film in the history of A24 and is widely seen as a major Oscar contender, not least for Hsu in the category of best supporting actress. Indeed, she has already been nominated for the equivalent Critics’ Choice and SAG awards, and an Oscar nomination seems likely to follow.
Over the course of an emotional conversation at the offices of The Hollywood Reporter, Hsu reflected on growing up — in real life — as the queer American daughter of an immigrant who didn’t exactly encourage her acting ambitions; how her own imagination of what her career could look like had definite limits, which may have actually been defense mechanisms, but which she has been as surprised as anyone to shatter time and again; the events that led to her and the Daniels meeting and eventually working together Everything Everywhere; what it’s been like having her career and Everything Everywhere, a film with a cast comprised principally of people of Asian descent, be so warmly embraced at a time when anti-Asian hate is surging across America; plus much more.
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