The seemingly limitless range of Hong Chau is on display in three films this year, in roles so different that they hardly seem the work of one actor.
she plays best friend and nurse to Brendan Fraser’s obese shut-in professor, his most regular visitor and assertive caregiver. She desperately, unsentimentally prods him to get healthier, to care about himself.Chau plays the idle landlord and artist colleague of Michelle Williams’ ceramics sculptor. She’s the mellower, more successful envy of Williams’ character, and yet kind of a regular companion.
“Even before I became more successful, I never really wanted to be amongst a group of actors or keep up with people and have that in my mind at all times,” Chau said in a recent interview from New Orleans where she was shooting Yorgos Lanthimos’ “And.” “It was always about myself and what I wanted out of it, and how I could do things that felt right for me.”
“Even to this day, I have trouble saying that I’m an actor because I struggle with talking about what my process is,” Chau says. “There are actor-actors out there who give these really in-depth, tremendous interviews about their process. They talk about it in such a way that makes me feel, ‘Maybe I’m not an actor.’ I just don’t think that way at all.”
Chau’s first job out of college was an administrative assistant at PBS. A life behind the camera seemed more likely to her, a mentality that’s translated to her acting. “Brendan joked to me the other day how at the end of a bunch of takes, I’d be like, ‘Let’s just do one more, Hong. Just surprise us, have some fun.’ Because she would always do something authentic and real but a different take on it,” says Aronofsky. “I do think if she wants to direct, she can direct. She thinks like a director.”
“It was initially very jarring for Mark,” says Chau, smiling. “I didn’t go as far as wanted to. I wanted to shave my eyebrows, and the compromise was that I’d just bleach my eyebrows. And he was like, ‘Hong, you’re a restaurant manager. Why would you look like that?’ Because she does!”