Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Hong Chau has agreed to be kidnapped. In her latest film, The Instigators, the Oscar-nominated actress plays a therapist — and hostage — whose coolheadedness emphasises the bumbling incompetence of her captors. They are played by Matt Damon as a cash-strapped single dad, who also happens to be her patient, and Casey Affleck as an ex-con.The Boston-set heist comedy was the cause for two reunions: between Damon and director Doug Liman, who made action-thriller The Bourne Identity together 22 years ago, and between Damon and Chau, who both starred in Alexander Payne’s oddball satire Downsizing in 2017.A slyly versatile character actor with a distinct, zany sense of humour, Chau’s supporting turns make the case for a performer’s right to pursue smaller, richer parts. She has turned heads as an eccentric billionaire villain in HBO’s Watchmen, the creepy and unflappable maître d’ of a high-end restaurant in The Menu and a charismatic but self-involved artist in Showing Up.“There can be really boring leading roles,” says Chau, 45, on a video call from Henley-on-Thames, 30 miles west of London, where she is filming an ensemble comedy with Hugh Jackman and Emma Thompson. “I’ve never looked down on doing supporting work.” Indeed, Hollywood has started to recognise that work too: in 2023, Chau received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her performance as Liz, nurse to Brendan Fraser’s Charlie, in The Whale.The Instigators is her first action movie. “And who better to do one with than Matt Damon?” she says. “I just blindly signed up for it.” However, despite the car chases and shoot-outs in the script, on set “it felt more like dad energy, as opposed to macho energy,” Chau says.The biggest set piece in the film is a high-speed pursuit that snakes across Boston. Really, though, the sequence is a vehicle for speedy repartee between Chau’s Dr Donna Rivera and Affleck’s Cobby. Much of it was improvised after Chau, Affleck and Liman decided that there should be “this really fun tension between the characters, like His Girl Friday — that sort of rat-a-tat-tat back and forth”.It’s a breezier on-set experience for Chau, whose intriguing hopscotch of choices has led her to work with some of Hollywood’s most meticulous auteurs, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos, Wes Anderson and Darren Aronofsky. Lanthimos invited her to appear in this year’s Kinds of Kindness after seeing her in Showing Up, whose director Kelly Reichardt had been impressed by her performance in indie drama Driveways.“Who gets to work with Paul Thomas Anderson on their very first movie [2014’s Inherent Vice]? And for their second movie, Alexander Payne?” she says, looking back on her first 10 years in the industry. “That’s crazy!” In Payne’s Downsizing, Chau played a dissident from Vietnam who loses her leg while escaping to the US. Though some critics took issue with her character’s accented broken English, Chau’s warm and witty performance was a breakout moment for the actor.She realised something had shifted at an audition, post-Downsizing, when she spotted the actor Kathryn Hahn in the waiting room. “I was like: ‘Oh, I’m no longer being called cattle with a bunch of other people who look like me; I’m being called in because somebody’s seeing my quality as an actor.” (In the end, Toni Collette got the role.)It has taken a while to get here. The daughter of Vietnamese refugees who settled in New Orleans, Chau grew up feeling “like a country mouse”. She desperately wanted to move to a big city. “As if a better culture was elsewhere!” she scoffs.She describes her experience of growing up in New Orleans East as “very different from your tourist brochure” image of the place. “It’s such a strange melting pot to begin with, with its history of the French and the Spanish, and then of course you have the history of it being a major port with slavery. To add the Vietnamese community from the 1970s forward, it’s different from what most people know of New Orleans.”Her neighbourhood was home to a small community (“It’s called Little Saigon by other people”) of fishermen, shrimpers and convenience store owners, like her parents. They worked long hours, and so she and her siblings watched a lot of films and TV at home. “We didn’t go to movie theatres, because we just couldn’t afford to,” she says.She developed a taste for art-house cinema from her older brother, who rented DVDs from the sale aisle in Blockbuster. “They were usually the international or weird indie films that nobody else wanted to rent,” she says. The 2000 indie comedy Chuck & Buck — written by and starring White Lotus creator Mike White — still “stands out very clearly” in her mind.Chau was also a bookworm who “always did the extra credit reading” at school. “I know there’s a stereotype of the overbearing Asian parent who’s pushing you to do well at school, but that wasn’t the experience I had at all,” she says. “I did well because I wanted to please my teachers, and I loved being around them.”Chau wanted to tell stories, and considered a creative writing degree, but her parents persuaded her to do something more practical instead. She studied film production at Boston University. “I naively thought, at the age of 17, that you could easily get a job with a film degree,” she says. “I was very wrong.”Her first job was working in the accounting department of US TV network PBS in New York. “I felt like, ‘At least I’m in sort of the right place — they do documentaries here,’” she recalls with a chuckle. She took improv classes in her spare time as “a way to improve myself”, she says.“I knew I was going to be held back in life if I wasn’t able to talk to people and express myself.” But as an introvert, she was also a good listener and an astute observer of others. “Now that I’m older, I don’t really see that as something that I need to overcome or deny.” It was through improv that she discovered a love of performing.Making The Instigators took Chau back to Boston and allowed her to revisit the university. There she realised how much had changed — not just on the campus but within herself. “Now I appreciate that I grew up where I did, as a Vietnamese immigrant, as the child of refugees, as somebody who grew up poor, as somebody for whom English was not their first language,” she says. “All of those things I didn’t see the value in are what makes me interesting now.”‘The Instigators’ is in US cinemas from August 2 and in UK cinemas and on Apple TV+ from August 9Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
