‘It’s not ego’: Ronny Chieng on Interior Chinatown and why he’ll never be the lead

“The first person in the scene of a procedural is either a victim or a witness,” says Willis Wu as he hauls rubbish into the bin at the back of uncle’s Chinese restaurant. You can guess what happens next.

It’s the opening scene of Interior Chinatown, a sharp satire adapted from Charles Yu’s best-selling 2020 comedy of the same name that skewers how Asian characters are represented on screen. The series follows Wu (played by Jimmy O. Yang), an aspiring actor who is perennially cast as a background character in the crime drama Black and White: Impossible Crimes Unit. He is either a “generic Asian man”, “delivery guy” or “tech guy”, when what he really wants to be is the leading man.

Everyone who works in Chinatown with Wu is a stereotype, from the women who work at the nail salon, to the local gangsters who meet in the Golden Palace restaurant, where Wu works as a waiter. It’s incredibly funny, layered and ridiculously meta, but, frankly, hard to describe. The whole thing is best summed up by what Wu says to his workmate Fatty Choi: “I feel like I’m a background character in someone else’s story.”

Jimmy O. Yang plays Willis Wu, who doesn’t want to be a background character in his own life in meta comedy Interior Chinatown.

That workmate is played with typically dry delivery by Ronny Chieng, the Malaysian-Chinese comedian who made his name on the Melbourne stand-up circuit. He is now a correspondent on the award-winning Daily Show in the US, as well as starring in films such as Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Crazy Rich Asians.

But, Chieng says, despite that success, he knows exactly how Willis and Fatty feel.

“First of all, I used to work in Australia, so I’m used to being a background character in other people’s stories a lot of the time,” he says. “So, drawing upon my Australian experience was really useful for this story. And I mean, in America, I get to do stand up, and I get to be on The Daily Show, but when I’m cast in TV and movie projects, I’m not the lead.

“That’s not me being bitter, it’s not ego, it’s just, factually, I’m not the lead. So I’m used to having a little bit of a ceiling put on me.”

Chloe Bennet, who plays Detective Lana Lee, understands where Chieng is coming from.

Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet) works with Willie Wu to bust crime gangs in Interior Chinatown.

“I never saw myself the way I think people see me now,” says Bennet, whose father is Chinese and mother is white. “I was raised a lot more Chinese than I appear, and my name is Chloe Wong, it’s not Chloe Bennett. I changed my name and the first time I did, I got work. I have a very rich and complicated relationship with being accepted. Initially, I was kind of fetishised, or kind of utilised as a token … that’s not being the lead, that’s being a version of what some white writer thinks of you.”

Yu initially wrote the book – which reads like teleplay of Black and White: Impossible Crimes Unit, while the show’s title is a pun on describing locations in scripts – because he’d been thinking about immigrant parents and how “they didn’t feel like they had a story worth telling”.

Ronny Chieng as Fatty Choi in Interior Chinatown.

“They just had a bunch of loose anecdotes, and they didn’t feel like main characters in any way,” he says. “So I tried to tell the story through them, but really it didn’t start clicking until I was like, ‘Oh, tell it through their kid, tell it through their son’ and also because I could understand that perspective better.”

Yu, who also wrote on Westworld, adapted his book for the screen, with Taika Waititi working as an executive producer and director of the first episode. For Waititi, who won a best adapted screenplay Oscar for Jojo Rabbit in 2020, it was the idea of being the hero of your story that resonated.

Taika Waititi on the set of Interior Chinatown, on which he worked as an executive producer and director of the first episode.

“I love the idea of creating a show and a story that follows someone who essentially lives in the background,” says Waititi. “I feel like we all go through life thinking we’re the main characters in our own stories, and we are. But sometimes, you look at other people around you, and you think they have stories too. They’ve got complex stories, and they’ve got stories worth telling.

“It’s really cool to focus on the idea that none of us ever really know what we’re doing or what our purpose is, or why we’re here, if we’re doing the job we’ve always dreamt of. The big question I always ask, is, ‘Is this it? Is this what I was meant to do? Am I following my dream?’”

Taika Waititi (left), Chloe Bennet, Jimmy O. Yang, and Ronny Chieng at the Los Angeles premiere of Interior Chinatown.Credit: Getty Images

If you’re not following your dream, Taika, I don’t know what you’re doing.

“I don’t know if I am,” he says. “And maybe, you know, in 10 to 15 years I’ll be like, ‘Oh my god, I wasted 28 years on film. I should have been making furniture out of driftwood.’”

Furniture-making aside, the dream that did come true for Waititi in the first episode was directing an epic kung-fu battle that ticks all the classic boxes.

“For the little kid in me who basically did pretend that he was in a martial arts film, probably until I was 18, most of the time, that was a big, big moment,” says Waititi. “I loved it. It was like when I first worked with some storm troopers on The Mandalorian. That little kid in me also felt pretty special then, and it was a similar feeling during the kung-fu fight.”

For Chieng, that kung-fu scene was not only fun, it’s a parody of every Asian gangster scene slotted into crime shows. Think Enter the Dragon but set in a suburban Chinese restaurant.

“You grow up watching Hong Kong fight movies – Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Stephen Chow – so always in your head, you dream of doing that stuff,” says Chieng. “I don’t have the physical talent to do it at a high level. But luckily, we have great stunt guys who trained us, and they gave us enough takes and training to execute stuff that looks really cool.

“So the coolest part of the fight scene is that it looks cool, and it’s also because we’re doing it tongue in cheek; there’s a bigger reason for it. We’re doing it ironically in a way, or at least doing it to say something else.”

Bennet agrees: “It’s not gratuitous, it’s not just a fight to watch people be violent. It’s still pushing the plot forward and being really, really smart about it.”

The fight sequence is a perfect distillation of what Interior Chinatown stands for: bringing Asian characters to forefront, not just relegating them to the foreground.

Do Yu and Waititi, who has made a point of championing First Nations stories in his native New Zealand, as well as in the US on his TV series Reservation Dogs, feel like representation has improved enough on screens over the years?

“It’s all been fixed,” deadpans Waititi, before deferring to Yu.

“It’s improved a lot,” says Yu. “At least for Asian Americans, it’s gotten to a point where representation for its own sake isn’t enough … But I also think there’s something to, not just the idea of people seeing people that look like them on screen, but people recognising themselves in totally different kinds of people.

“That’s what stories really can do, is make you see yourself in someone, in an alien or a robot or a dinosaur or someone who is of a different race or a different gender or sexual orientation. And that, to me, is the power of representation. It’s getting at something deeper, not just sort of superficial qualities.”

Chieng, meanwhile, hopes Interior Chinatown makes people open their eyes a little more.

“Forget the TV show,” he says. “How do you see background people in everyday life? In your actual local pub or your local restaurant, your local cafe, these background people who make life happen for everyone. What’s their story?”

As for whether Chieng would ever return to Australia and be the star of his own nightly political comedy show, the answer is a firm no.

“I’m OK, I’m OK,” he says, laughing. “Charlie Pickering has got it covered.”

He’s only on TV for three months of the year.

“Yeah, OK. I’ll go, and they won’t be able to put me on TV because I’m not white enough, so it’s all right.”

Interior Chinatown is now streaming on Disney+.

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