All 10 episodes are now streaming on Hulu.
At some point, we all wonder: are we the star of our own story or just another face in the crowd? Through the journey of Willis Wu — a man stuck between aspiration and the reality he's expected to accept — "Interior Chinatown" (2024) delivers a tale that is both strange and achingly familiar. Willis exists in a world where everything is scripted, literally. Conventionally cast as Generic Asian Man in a fictionalized cop show, he dreams of transcending the background role he's been relegated to. But breaking free means confronting the invisible rules that shape not just his life but the lives of everyone around him. "Interior Chinatown" weaves together biting satire, surreal imagery, and poignant drama in a humorous and heartfelt exploration of identity, ambition, and the spaces between who we are and who we long to be.
The novel that the show is based on bears the same name, and, ironically, is told through the unconventional framework of screenplay format, with shifting fonts and typography that mirror Willis's fragmented internal life. Despite the already-cinematic feel of the book, adapting it to the screen was no small feat. Author and show creator Charles Yu recalls the challenge of manifesting the novel's dual worlds outside of a reader's imagination without losing their complexity. "I might just type a few words casually, and then all of a sudden I have 50 people asking me, okay, so what color is that? Or what does that look like?" he says. "In a bigger conceptual sense, the challenge is the book plays in a kind of liminal space, I would say. How do you make it clear that Willis is caught between two worlds? How do you make the world of the cop show, make it feel very real and literal, and then drop Willis into that world?"
Taika Waititi, director of the pilot episode, brings those coexisting planes to life with strikingly different visual languages. "If you're thinking about the world around [Willis] from his point of view and how he sees himself, it's kind of bland and muted colors," says Waititi. "And it's all handheld, so it feels a bit rough and clumsy. Then you contrast that with the world of the show-within-the-show 'Black & White.' We wanted that to be heightened. People are backlit, and it's all special lighting, and the camera work [is] always smooth and slick."
"We worked really hard on trying to make it feel like a '90s-style police procedural," Charles Yu adds. "Sometimes a little bit off-kilter and hopefully funny, but real enough that you get it, that it feels like the world that Willis wants to enter."
"The really interesting thing is that [the procedural] is a world that [Willis] aspires to get into," says Waititi. "Coming from New Zealand, that would be like how I imagined everything to look [in Hollywood]. But when you think about the closer you get to those dreams or the closer you get to being a part of that world, the more you realise the world you come from is actually more beautiful."
For Jimmy O. Yang, who plays Willis Wu, the character's struggle to break free from stereotypical roles is deeply personal. Reflecting on his own career, Yang sees many parallels between his journey and Willis's. "I think I've actually done a lot of these characters that Willis ends up being assigned to or has gone through through," he says. "I was Generic Asian Man. I was Chinese Teenager #1 on 'Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,' a show that Chloe [Bennet] was a star in, funnily enough. I also snuck in as the tech guy, right? Like on 'Silicon Valley.'"
While these roles were welcomed at the time, Yang recalls how he didn't fully realize he was being put in a box. "I think I kind of had a blind optimism about me in my younger self, that although I didn't see a lot of myself on TV or I didn't see people like me being the star, I was like, you know what? It's one thing at a time. It's one step at a time."
As Yang's career evolved, so did his understanding of Asian representation in Hollywood. Reflecting on this particular project, he explains, "It means everything. I think I'm very fortunate to have actually gone through every single number on the call sheet to be able to inform and help tell this story. But just being able to be a part of this and bring my own self and my experience to bring this character to life was quite special."
"I think people talk a lot about representation and seeing someone that looks like you on screen and how much that means, and I absolutely agree with that," Charles Yu confirms. "I also think it's important to see yourself in people that don't look anything like you. And I think we got to make this [show] with a really inclusive crew. Yes, I mean a lot of Asian Americans, but I also mean a lot of non-Asian Americans."
"Getting to tell this story on a platform like Hulu with people like Taika and our cast and so many other people is an amazing chance to tell stories about people that don't normally get that treatment," Yu says. "To really humanize and add dimension to them."
Just as the show spotlights characters who are often overlooked, "Interior Chinatown" also offers a critique of how women — especially women of color — are often defined by their relationship to men or reduced to a simplified version of their identity. Detective Lana Lee, played by "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." star Chloe Bennet, makes her grand entrance on screen in slow motion, hair blowing in the conveniently-aimed wind, glowing with the magical light of heroism behind her. Initially presented as Willis's ultimate fantasy — both as a woman and a main character in his story — Lana is promptly hoisted onto a pedestal of tokenized desirability with little attention paid to who she actually is and what she might want for herself or struggle with.
Yet as Willis's story progresses, so does Lana's. She exists beyond her connection to Willis and the role she plays in catalyzing his so-called awakening, giving her character something far more complex and layered than the part that was written for her. "There's a mystery within Lana that is revealed throughout the season," says Chloe Bennet. "Tonally, I really wanted the performance to be something that you could watch the first time around and be like, oh, that makes sense. But then you could watch it again. And if you're really paying attention, there are cracks to her façade, whether it's just little glances or just acknowledging the larger truth of who she is or what she doesn't know about herself right away."
"Each character has their own version of discovering who they are and ultimately finding where they belong," Bennet continues. "I think Lana is seemingly a real asset to help Willis figure that out. At the same time, she's stuck in her own world trying to find out where she fits, how she is her own main character."
"I think it's relatable for women," Bennet adds. "The trope of your relevance depending on whether you're in tandem with a man or how you're servicing a man. For a lot of women in film and TV, that is a constant box that we are put in. And I think that the show addresses that in a really smart way."
The mystery of Lana also cannot be separated from her race. Through her, the show points to how mixed-race characters navigate a tightrope of identity, forced to exist somewhere between idealization and marginalization. In the fictionalized cop show, Lana's purpose is to be proof that the police department is "culturally considerate" — a statement made openly and with poorly-hidden resentment. "She toes the line as being this icon that is ethnic enough," says Bennet. "Ethnically ambiguous. She's white enough that we can let her in."
Bennet's connection to Lana's struggle with identity feels deeply personal, as she navigates her own experiences of balancing belonging and alienation as a mixed-race actress. "It's more than just not fitting in, not necessarily feeling whole," Bennet says. "Psychologically, you can start to tell yourself a lot of things about what you are or what you're not, especially if you're just constantly referred to as half of something. It's not something that fits into a box in a way that's satisfying for an entirely white world or an entirely Asian world. I didn't have to fake a lot of the feelings of frustration or feeling like an interracial pawn to satiate both sides of things."
"And certainly, for [Lana], it's breaking out of that in a lot of ways," Bennet finishes. "For Lana, her bigger journey is trying to take another step closer to finding out where she belongs, what she wants, and what her story looks like if it's not about somebody else."
Through "Interior Chinatown," Charles Yu reminds us that identity is never as simple as the roles we play or the labels we're given. Whether it's Willis striving to be more than Generic Asian Man or Lana's search for her own identity, the show peels back the layers of performance to reveal the intricacy of humanity. "It's about who we really are underneath and how we sometimes feel like we have to perform aspects of ourselves or aspects of other people's expectations — and then what happens when some of that starts to slip," says Yu. "Just finding those genuine moments of connection between people and authenticities is what I hope people really start to see the show is about."
All 10 episodes of 'Interior Chinatown' (2024) are now streaming on Hulu.
Based on Charles Yu’s award-winning book of the same name, the show follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural called "Black & White." Relegated to the background, Willis goes through the motions of his on-screen job, waiting tables, dreaming about a world beyond Chinatown and aspiring to be the lead of his own story. When Willis inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, he begins to unravel a criminal web in Chinatown, while discovering his own family’s buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.
CAST: Jimmy O. Yang, Ronny Chieng, Chloe Bennet, Archie Kao, Diana Lin
Recurring guest stars include: Tzi Ma, Chris Pang, Annie Chang, Chau Long
CREDITS: Series creator Charles Yu serves as executive producer, along with Dan Lin and Linsey Liberatore for Rideback; Jeff Skoll, Miura Kite, and Elsie Choi for Participant; Garrett Basch for Dive; John Lee; and Taika Waititi, who also directed the pilot. The 10-episode limited series is produced by 20th Television.
Cover Photo: Courtesy of Hulu
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