Hoa Xuande’s long journey from Cabramatta to HBO’s The Sympathizer
Things are about to change for Australia’s dazzling Hoa Xuande. But at 36, the star of HBO’s upcoming The Sympathizer is anything but an overnight success story.
The Caterpillar Club is a former strip club deep in the belly of an office building in Sydney’s Martin Place; a rabbit warren of secret doorways, jazz stages and snug, wine-red leather booths designed for accidental foot-touching. This is a city where the response to the question “Where is the coolest place to get a drink?” changes daily. But on a Monday afternoon in mid-March the answer is unquestionably “here”. It’s an excellent place to lock eyes with someone over a cocktail after skipping out early from work. And it is quite possibly the worst place to conduct an interview.
This is where I find myself waiting for the actor Hoa Xuande to appear. Classic scheduling mishap: he’s ambling patiently out front while I’m at the back, underneath a disco ball with no phone reception, surrounded by speakers blasting funk records. After that’s sorted, and the requisite amount of faffing – do we want to get anything to eat? Maybe just some chips? – we settle in with two sweating lemon lime and bitters. “I would have a drink,” begins Xuande, who is affable and unguarded in the way people are before they become very famous, but he rode his motorbike here and he’s still on his Ls.
Today is an auspicious day to meet, because it also happens to be the day of the Academy Awards. Xuande spent the morning at home in Waterloo laying down tape for an audition but tore himself away to watch Robert Downey Jr win an Oscar. “I messaged him, but, you know, he’s in the midst of it right now,” says Xuande.
This is a fun game to play with a rising star: who is the most famous person’s number you have in your phone? For Xuande it is unquestionably Downey Jr, his scene partner in The Sympathizer, the HBO adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen about a North Vietnamese mole within a South Vietnamese community in Los Angeles.
In 2022, after eight months of auditions for legendary Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (of Oldboy fame), during which Xuande beat out actors from every corner of the Vietnamese diaspora, he was cast in the lead role as The Captain, a spy torn between conflicting countries, identities and sympathies. Streaming this month on Binge, The Sympathizer represents the biggest role of the 36-year-old’s career.
In Australia, Xuande is best known for his roles in the SBS series Hungry Ghosts, andthe ABC comedy Ronny Chieng International Student, in which he starred as a straight-A student who engineers a drug lab turning meth back into pseudoephedrine to sell as a study aid to his fellow nerds. Xuande played it all with such foul-mouthed, straight-faced dyspepsia, he was the perfect comedic foil to Ronny Chieng. But that series was released in 2017, when Xuande was fresh out of drama school.
He says of The Sympathizer: “I’ve been trying to do work of this calibre for so long that sometimes it’s like, you know when they say be careful what you wish for?” This is the first thing he says once all the logistical chat is out of the way – and after more than two hours talking closely in the low-lit dive bar din, it’s the most revealing. “I’ve finally gotten to a place where this is what I’ve always dreamed of. And now having to talk about it, I’m at a loss for words sometimes … You know, ‘Who are you? What are you?’” Xuande muses, leaning back in the booth. “I’m still trying to figure it all out.”
The first time you see him in The Sympathizer, his face is turned away from the camera. He’s in captivity, pleading for his life, furiously penning a confession of all his duplicitous misdeeds as a double agent. Who sniffed him out? Unclear. Will he survive? It’s not looking good. Xuande whips his face around to the audience and it’s a mask of desperation. And then the voiceover kicks in: a sardonic American accent with a sly, slippery wit.
The novel garnered so much acclaim because of this tone, which shifts between irreverence and anger, despair and gross-out humour like gears on a ’64 Ford Falcon. The Sympathizer recreates it piece by indelible piece. Episode one ends with the crazed scramble for evacuation before the fall of Saigon. Episode two sees The Captain radiating charm as he begins romancing Ms Mori (Sandra Oh). Episode three contains the most beautiful assassination ever committed to film, against the backdrop of Fourth of July fireworks. It also wraps up with a scene so delicious I don’t want to spoil it, but suffice to say it features a gimlet-eyed Xuande opposite multiple iterations of Downey Jr, who plays four different characters in the series.
Xuande first read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel when he was in New Zealand in 2020, filming Netflix’s remake of the manga Cowboy Bebop. Being part of a sprawling ensemble cast necessitated long periods of downtime – anathema to Xuande, who has the actor’s particular affliction of self-doubt muddled with laser focus. To pass the time he hired a car and drove up and down the coast to go surfing. He borrowed The Sympathizer from Auckland Library and managed three chapters, detailing the traumatic escape from Vietnam, before he had to return it. “It absolutely tore me to bits,” Xuande says of the book. He vowed to finish it when he returned to Australia, but life got in the way.
Then, in January 2022, he caught wind of an HBO project called The Sympathizer seeking Vietnamese actors. “That’s that book I started reading two years ago,” he remembers thinking. He recorded an audition and a fortnight later was Zooming with director Park Chan-wook and the producers. He thought it went terribly. (Actors always think auditions went terribly.) He picked up the book and read it in earnest. He wrote two very serious letters to Park about himself, about what the book meant to him, what the character represented. Then he was asked to travel to Korea to have dinner with the director. “I’m really good at running my mouth,” Xuande smiles. “I was talking to him about Korea and Vietnam, how similar they are … We were getting along really well. And then I remember his producer dropped me off at the end after a really good night, and hugged me and said, ‘Well, if you’re the right guy, we’ll see you again.” Then Xuande returned to Sydney and didn’t hear anything for a month.
It was the worst kind of ghosting, like staring at your phone after a really great date, wondering if they have slipped out to see other people. “I was a mess,” Xuande admits. “I woke up at 3am so many days. I walked from Waterloo to Circular Quay just wracking my brain … Just trying to figure out what kind of f. king game they were playing with me.”
In August, Xuande was asked to travel to Los Angeles to audition again. At the time, Xuande was doing night shoots onthe TV drama series Last King Of The Cross, and hegot off the plane so exhausted that he went into the audition “like a zombie”. He decided to throw one final Hail Mary pass: a monologue from the book when The Captain meets The Auteur, one of the characters played by Robert Downey Jr, a filmmaker tackling a Vietnam War movie that is very much a play on Apocalypse Now. In it, The Captain lets out the bloodcurdling scream of a persecuted man. “I think Park and [co-showrunner] Don McKellar were kind of like, ‘What the hell?’” says Xuande, smiling at the memory. “But I was really proud that I did it. ’Cos I was like, if I don’t get this role, I’d be proud of the fact that I took a chance.” A month later, they called Xuande to say he’d got the job. (“Truth be told, I was convinced shortly after having met him in the Zoom,” Park admits to The Weekend Australian Magazine.)
Xuande landed in LA on October 29 – his birthday – and was soon introduced to his co-stars, Oh and Downey Jr. “I remember doing the first rehearsal with Sandra and the director coming up to me like, ‘Just remember your character. You are this strong, held-together man …’ And I was like, ’Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry. I’m actually not playing my character. I’m actually just fanboying over the fact that I’m working with Sandra. I’ll pull myself together.’”
On Zoom, Oh laughs as she remembers that first day. “Did he tell you about his eyeball?” she grins. During production, Xuande had to wear blue contact lenses over his brown eyes, which required some adjustment. “Having come from the Commonwealth as well, ’cos I’m Canadian, I feel like I could read him a little bit. It’s just like, ‘No really, dude, ask for help. It’s totally OK,’” says Oh. “I just remember, I’m like, ‘Oh wait. You can’t even see, either?’ He goes, ‘Yeah. I think it’s stuck to my eyeball.’”
Then Xuande heard over the radio, “Robert’s on set.” Downey Jr (who plays four roles in the series: The Captain’s CIA handler, an Oriental studies professor, a congressman who served in the war, and the auteur) took Xuande aside and gave him a hug. “He was like, ‘Brother, we’re so glad to have you. Me and you, we’re gonna screw this up together,’” Xuande shares. “I remember that being so comforting, because it brought me down to a level that I didn’t feel like I had to prove anything. I felt that me and him were just gonna play around, and that set the tone for literally the entire shoot.”
The Sympathizer was a gruelling six-month production in Los Angeles and Thailand, and Xuande was on set for all but one of the 115 days of filming. “Honestly, I was just concerned that he was getting enough sleep,” says Oh. She viewed her role as one of support. “I know Robert would say the same thing, to be very much a support for him and all of our Vietnamese cast members … especially Hoa. I mean, he’s carrying the entire thing on his shoulders.” (Their dynamic is encapsulated by the fact that Xuande warmly refers to Oh as his “on set mother” and Downey Jr as his “on set father”.)
What about away from work, what is he like? “One, he’s extremely handsome,” Oh smiles. “He’s extremely striking. And then he’s also quite playful.” Xuande is striking, with a face that’s all cheekbones and a terrific smile. The playfulness came in handy as he worked to keep up with Downey Jr, whose performance was built on rapid-fire improvisation. “Sometimes I’d think I’d be clever enough to keep up and he’d have something straight back that he would throw at me,” Xuande admits.
Downey Jr tells The Weekend Australian Magazine – fresh from his Oscar win – that Xuande is “well trained, prepared, intelligent and teachable”. “I watched him become a star,” Downey Jr adds. “He owned the complexity of portraying The Captain. The camera loves him, and so did his crew and co-stars. It was like a breakout season for an exceptional athlete. I really enjoyed experiencing Hoa rack up goals on the field.”
Xuande was born in Cabramatta in 1987. His parents had fled post-war Vietnam and travelled to Australia by boat as refugees, settling in Sydney; when Xuande was three, the family relocated to Melbourne. “They wanted to start fresh in a completely new country, and embrace the country they were in and not dwell on the misfortunes of the war,” he explains. He grew up the “token Asian kid amongst a lot of Greek and Italian friends”.
As a child, he didn’t really care about movies; the posters on his wall were of Collingwood captain Nathan Buckley. (His childhood dream was to be the first Asian player in the AFL.) His parents ran a bakery. “They worked really hard. They saved up a lot of money. They tried to give us a really good education and a really good life.” Xuande pauses. “They were very strict.” He pauses again. “I was very rebellious as a kid.” He ran away from home. He fought with his father. “I think when you want to pursue the artistic life, you are gonna definitely make your parents angry,” he reflects. “I knew that I didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. I just knew that for a fact. And I would rebel at any opportunity that arose, of them forcing me down this narrow path.”
Xuande struggled with something that many children of immigrants have experienced. In one of his letters to Park, Xuande wrote that, much like The Captain – who wrestles with his half-Vietnamese ethnicity – he spent years feeling like he didn’t belong. “I never felt like I had to play that, because if you do have an understanding of that, it’s innately within you.”
Xuande stresses that he isn’t speaking on behalf of mixed race people, but for his own experience as the child of two Vietnamese parents in Australia, which was “really conflicted”. “I’m not Vietnamese enough because I don’t speak Vietnamese very well,” he explains. (Though he learnt to speak his lines fluently for The Sympathizer.) “Every time my parents spoke Vietnamese to me I never wanted to answer them in Vietnamese, because I was like, ‘That’s not who I am!’ I really wanted to be Australian, but I knew that all my friends weren’t like me. That I was clearly not like them. But my psychology and the culture that I was born into, I was them, I just didn’t look like them.”
Over time, Xuande’s relationship with his parents healed and is now “great”, and his understanding of identity also shifted. “I was always trying to figure out which one of those two sides of me is my true self, but I think I’ve come to terms, now especially, that they’re both me,” he reflects. “Before, it’s like one of these is my true self, and I’m wracking myself trying to figure it out. Like, which one of these people needs to die?”
Two things helped Xuande find his place. The first was discovering surfing at 21, which taught him the importance of patience and dedication. “Waves come and go. You can’t catch all of them,” he explains. “But when you catch them, you have to give it everything you got or it’s gonna wipe you out. I take that approach in life.”
And then along came acting. After school, Xuande had tried journalism, then marketing, then hospitality. None of them stuck, but while working in a bar he’d met some actors who hinted at another life. He saw Requiem For A Dream and was struck by Ellen Burstyn’s character’s desire to appear on television to make her family proud. The film inspired Xuande to apply for drama schools, and he was accepted into Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), alma mater of Hugh Jackman, in 2013.
There, he met Dacre Montgomery, another WAAPA rising star who would go on to play the lead in Stranger Things. “We are literally like brothers,” declares Montgomery, who grew up in Perth. While studying at WAAPA he lived at his parents’ place, which became Xuande’s home away from home. They performed Glengarry Glen Ross together at WAAPA, spent Christmases with Montgomery’s fiancée, and have the kind of intimacy that is blurred around the edges, when you don’t know where you start and your best mate ends. Montgomery sums it up like this: “Hoa’s the kind of guy, like, he’ll come around and play Call of Duty and have dinner with us two nights a week, and then we’ll go to bed and he’ll stay up playing Call of Duty and just let himself out.”
It was Montgomery who Xuande turned to in 2019, frustrated after almost four years of muddling his way through post-drama-school rejections. “I called him one day saying, ‘I’m over it. I’ve had it,’” Xuande recalls. He was ready to give it all up.
“There’s only so many times you can get knocked back,” Montgomery says. “I said to him, ‘You’re far too talented to let this go.’”
After Xuande graduated from WAAPA, he’d written a ten-year plan: work with Cate Blanchett, do plenty of theatre, film two movies in four years, book a juicy supporting role in a prestige television series. “None of it happened,” says Xuande. “I’ve had roles that I haven’t been proud to do, but it was work and it paid the bills. And then there was stuff that – ‘Great, finally, someone is seeing me.’”
According to research conducted by Screen Australia, the percentage of non-European lead characters increased from 6.9 to 16 per cent between 2016 and 2023, but South East Asian representation accounts for only 1.7 per cent of lead roles. “I’ve been able to audition for roles that I used to not be able to play,” shares Xuande. “But we’re still seeing the same people playing the same roles. So are those opportunities for the sake of opportunity, or are we really trying to progress to seeing new faces on television?” Xuande’s hope with The Sympathizer is for audiences to see the depth of the Vietnamese experience. “Hopefully, for the first time, people can see Vietnamese people as more than just Vietnamese. Like, we’re actually just people able to do the multitude of things that we’ve seen other people do [on screen].”
Xuande’s ambition has always been to play “characters with deep emotional depth that had something to fight for”. It’s a description that sums up The Captain perfectly. “I think, in a way, this role found me. I think I’ve peaked,” he laughs. “It’s over.” (It’s not. It’s the beginning. It’s the beginning of the beginning.)
Montgomery was living in Los Angeles when The Sympathizer and was able to visit the set and join Xuande for a Super Bowl party at Downey Jr’s Malibu mansion. “They have such a great, unique friendship,” Montgomery reveals. “They have such good banter.” Then a few nights before our interview, Xuande went to Montgomery’s house to watch the The Sympathizer’s first episodes. “For all of that worry and so many nights of him going, ‘I hope I get this right,’” Montgomery recalls, “I was like, ‘Buddy, you had absolutely nothing to worry about. You absolutely nailed it.’”
Author Viet Thanh Nguyen is a fan of Hoa’s performance, too. “Hoa is just an astonishing actor,” he says. “He’s in almost every scene for seven hours, and has to run a gamut of emotions from guarded and repressed to charming and persuasive to raging and terrified. I’m sure it was a physically and mentally demanding role, and he always carried himself with grace and a bit of mystery — like the Sympathizer himself.”
The Sympathizer wrapped at five in the morning after an all-night shoot in Thailand. Xuande had spent weeks filming scenes set in a prison. “I was dirty,” he laughs. “Every day for two weeks they would just cake my face with dirt.” And frankly, he was running on empty. “I was so over it, which is probably where my character needed to be, anyway.”
The initial plan was to return to Australia but a few of his co-stars, including Fred Nguyen Khan, who plays The Captain’s best friend Bon, wanted to travel around Vietnam to commemorate their shared experience. They begged Xuande to join them, even just for a week. He booked a ticket the next day and stayed for a month. Starting in Saigon, the group worked their way through Da Nang and Hoi An, up to Hanoi and back again. “We just sat around and ate food,” Xuande laughs. Many bowls of fragrant pho. Even more of cháo suon, pork ribs swimming in thick congee. “When we were working, he didn’t allow himself to go out and socialise because he was so busy,” says Nguyen Khan. In Vietnam, Xuande was finally able to relax. “He was down to do anything. He would suggest a lot of stuff, like, ‘Let’s go to a club!’ I was like, ‘Oh really? You’re like this!’”
Now is the time for it, just before the whole fame thing reaches critical mass. Xuande remembers having lunch with Oh and Downey Jr and talking about fame. “Sandra asked Rob, ‘What was it like for you, after the first Iron Man came out?’” Xuande says. “He was just like, he welcomed it. He embraced it. He took the journey wherever it went.” Xuande is trying to heed Downey Jr’s wisdom. “I’m aware of the fact that things could change, but I’m also aware of the fact that I’m still gonna be me,” he sums up. “I’m probably still gonna go for a burger at Grill’d and sit in a corner by myself and probably no one will know me. That’s fine by me. I actually like that.” Oh’s advice for Xuande is to stay in the moment. “One can have a certain type of expectation,” she explains. “I would just say, try to let go of all of that, and just show up fully for this experience.”
A week after we first meet, I relay this to Xuande on the phone. “That’s great advice,” he says. “I think I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a normal experience.” By the time you read this, he’ll be in Hollywood for the premiere; he’s bringing his parents as his dates. “I feel like it’s something that would be important for them to at least see,” says Xuande. “And maybe I’ll never get to tell a story of this nature again, so I thought it would be nice for them,” he adds with a laugh. He knows that none of this is normal: texting Downey Jr, making plans to catch up when he gets to Los Angeles, preparing for the world to watch something that he poured his heart into. It’s a dream come true, made even sweeter by the fact that it’s a dream that came true after more than a decade of being dreamt. Like waiting so long in the water for the perfect wave that, by the time it arrives, you’re one with the board. “I am proud to say that I gave it everything,” Xuande concludes. “For better or for worse, I left nothing behind.”
The Sympathizer streams on Binge from April 15.
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