Sandra Oh Breaks Down Her Career, from 'Grey's Anatomy' to 'Killing Eve'

It was being able to read her voice

so clearly on that page.

It's like a sense of knowing

that you're gonna fall in love,

that you somehow you know that you get the person.

I understand what you're trying to say

and I am the right one for you.

[inspiring music]

Hi, I'm Sandra Oh and this is the timeline

of my career so far.

[inspiring music]

My dad would read to me and I would get this,

I would get this great feeling of going into another world.

I started acting on camera early at about 14, 15.

I grew up in Canada in a small town called Nepean

just outside of Ottawa, the capital.

And so a lot of my early career

was just scrapping away of trying to get myself on camera

in any kind of form.

So when this opportunity came of The Diary of Evelyn Lau,

which was a television film for the CBC,

I knew it was going to change my life.

I was still in theater school

at the National Theater School.

My sister's friend saw an ad.

It was an open audition call for young Asian actresses.

And my sister called me, I remember this so well,

I can feel it.

She goes, My friend said,

there's this open audition for this thing.

And she was telling me about it

and I remember this feeling of like,

This is mine, it's mine.

And I knew that I had to play this role.

It just established everything

I think of who I am as an actor.

I just remember just giving my all.

It was just so fundamental for me

and not many people know it, you know what I mean?

It's a Canadian television film,

but it just set up so much for my life as an artist.

[upbeat music]

I woke up and found myself in the arms of a stranger.

[Girl] I know you're up there!

Okay, shut up, I'm coming.

I met the director of Double Happiness,

Mina Shum, on the set of Diary of Evelyn Lau,

because she came into play like a translator or something.

And then she gave me her script, Double Happiness.

It was an amazing meeting.

And now, Mina Shum is, we're collaborators.

I've done three of her films.

We've done a film a decade, seriously.

Our twenties, our thirties, and our forties.

I'm sure hopefully she'll be writing one

when I can do one in my fifties.

And that ended up being just an unbelievable collaboration

and a long-term relationship.

My relationship with Canada is I left theater school

and I went right into work,

right into the work that I wanted to do.

The Diary of Evelyn Lau, I played Evelyn Lau.

In Double Happiness, Jade Li, I played Jade Li.

And to take the ownership and the leadership

in the leading role, that's how I started

out of theater school.

And that's my relationship with Canada.

And I'm deeply, deeply appreciative of it,

because things changed when I came to the States.

When I look back, right, I feel like

I learnt so much or so much of my own approach or character

was based on the opportunities that I had

through my schooling at the National Theater School

right into like the first few years out of it,

because I did a lot.

I think back now, I just knew how it could be.

[jazz music]

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

that saved a wretch like me.

I will always be so grateful

to Robert Wuhl for casting me in HBO's Arliss.

I had never done television, I had never done comedy.

And he just took a gamble on me.

You know, it was HBO in the nineties.

It was like a really inventive and salty, spicy time.

So I just cut my teeth.

I was in my twenties, I was working with all men.

It was all in sports

and I was really learning comedy hard and fast.

I had done a lot of improv in my high school years.

And I went to theater school,

but really being able to use those skills

in this television show, [scoffs] it was a fun time.

It was a fun time.

I think the biggest difference

are the things that I started learning

about comedy and drama.

The difference is understanding comedy in a wide shot

and what you can carry, mostly physically,

and also understanding how much drama is about a close-up.

What I learned from Arliss was just

really using my body a lot more expressively.

I haven't seen that show in a long time.

I'm sure there's a lot of crazy things that I had to do.

[upbeat music]

This is our Estate Syrah.

You're a bad, bad girl, Stephanie.

I know I need to be spanked.

Looking back at my career,

what the decisions were regarding choosing roles,

it was to find roles where I wouldn't be

cut out of the film.

It has to do with the scripts, I really do think so.

I mean, Sideways was an amazing experience.

I feel confidently say that everyone who participated

on that film, I think of that film so fondly.

Alexander Payne really gave the company

the four of us space to kind of be together.

That's the kind of magic

that you need to have a good director

who understands how to create an entire system

where everyone's going to be able to feel free

and bring magic into it.

So with that and the trust that I had with

Paul and Thomas, it was being able to go all the way.

So the major scene for Stephanie

that mostly people probably won't remember

is that Stephanie beats Thomas Hayden Church.

Look at what I got for our favorite girl.

You mother [beeping].

Jesus Christ!

You [beeping]!

Lying piece of [beeping]!

You're getting married on Saturday?

What was all that [beeping] you said to me?

So as Stephanie, who was weeping,

'cause she felt betrayed,

I was weeping while I was beating him.

And that is comedy, because you're talking about

in the context, what the character is doing,

she's in her own dramatic film.

But again, when we're talking about comedy and drama,

what can also make something work so well,

I mean, you have big physicality

of a small woman beating on a guy who deserves it.

And I think in an underground way,

a lot of people could really, really feel that desire

to beat someone up.

[upbeat music]

We don't have to do that thing where I say something,

and then you say something, and then somebody cries,

and there's like a moment.

Yuck. Great.

You should get some sleep.

You look like crap.

I look better than you.

That's not possible.

The reason why I wanted to play Cristina

in Grey's Anatomy is because dramaturgically

at least in the pilot, and again,

you never knew if it would go past a pilot,

she was the antagonist.

Meredith Grey is the protagonist

and clearly she was the antagonist.

And I'm like, That is the part that I wanted to play.

I found her interesting, I found her prickly,

I found her having a lot of the qualities

that I don't particularly feel like I have.

I just was also at a point

where I did not want to play a character of authority.

I was more interested in the role of the student,

because you have to find stuff out, you don't have answers.

You're the person trying to find stuff out.

That's where story is.

I approached it and my team approached it

in a very Cristina way.

Classically in television, you sign a contract

before you actually audition to do the final auditions.

And we went into these final auditions for the studio.

I came in early to do kind of a work session

with Shonda, and Peter, and Betsy, so I just worked it.

We went through the scenes,

so they did see me what I was going to do with Cristina.

They saw me act her.

And then when it was time to wait for,

you know, studio blah-blah-blah to audition like properly,

my great team called me and they said,

Walk out, just leave,

because they couldn't get the deal

that they felt that I deserved,

which I am eternally grateful to them for.

And so I was like, Uh, okay, I gotta leave this audition.

But I also, I would say thinking back to it,

I was at that point in my career of practicing that no.

I had to systematically start focusing on

how I wanted to build my career

in the way of just internally.

Now I'm ready to say no.

Here's work, here's this.

I'm ready to say no if it doesn't

match up to where I wanted to be.

So I said no, but then Shonda said, I want her.

So I guess it worked.

Are you done? No!

Now I am.

Oh! Don't do that.

Don't do that.

[table clatters]

[Eve hyperventilates]

Well, Phoebe Waller-Bridge has such a unique

and singular voice.

It's right there on the page.

That experience of first getting that first pilot script,

I'm always going to be looking for that feeling now forward.

It was being able to read her voice so clearly on that page.

It's like a sense of knowing

that you're gonna fall in love.

It's like a sense of that you somehow you know

that you get the person.

I understand what you're trying to say

and I am the right one for you.

I'm gonna be able to get you what you want,

because there's something extremely interesting here

and it's just like I get it.

And I think that was very much the feeling

that I was operating on when I decided to do Killing Eve.

It's great to just play Eve and I will share this.

It's not great like it feels good.

It's great, because she's a great character

and what she's trying to do, I really believe in.

So being able to put all of yourself into that role

is a tremendous gift, not necessarily always easy.

I do feel like a special part of Killing Eve is that

it's a profoundly psychological piece.

But as you see Eve grow, it has to be believable.

You have to see someone growing in front of you

and that's actually not so easy to do. [laughs]

So that's really been my aim

to examine the psyche of a woman

and how she needs to be whole.

And that's what Eve needs

and gets from her relationship with Villanelle.

It could also be the other way around,

but I don't wanna speak for Villanelle.

That takes work to be whole.

What is your pin?

One, two, three, four.

Hey, I don't know how to say this,

so I'm just gonna say it.

Get your shit together.

What drew me to The Chair is that same feeling

I feel like when,

Sarah Paulson emailed me and she said,

Hey, can I send you something?

My friend Amanda did it.

And then I read it and it's that, I get this person's voice.

And I feel like I understand what she's trying to do

and I think I can do it.

And the world that Amanda created in The Chair,

which is the world of academia and all the subject matters

with which she's tackling.

Ageism, sexism, you have academia,

the complexity of, I'm loathe to call it cancel culture,

because it's such a quick way of minimizing the challenge of

being nuanced in one's action and opinion.

It's also exploring being a single mom,

transracial adoption, multiple languages,

and what it is to be a working woman.

So Ji-Yoon Kim, with the character I play in The Chair,

she's the first female and chair of this English department

and person of color, and you just see

what happens to this woman

who is trying to navigate a midlife-budding romance

with Bill played by Jay Duplass,

and who's also trying to keep her English department alive

and the challenges that she's constantly squeezed by.

It's funny, the two of you are like --

Yeah, there's nothing funny about it, Bill.

Pay attention to your courses.

The only reason you enroll high

is because of your reputation.

I am glad that over my career,

which started at the age of 15 that now I'm nearing 50

that things have evolved.

But I am not going to say, Oh great,

there has been a change.

It's an evolution, and it is slow,

and I'm just not gonna give it

what we all hope that it is that,

Oh, it's changed, because it is evolving.

And I feel very much that I'm glad

that I am working through its evolution

and in its evolution.

Anyone who really understands or really

can finally kind of experience change,

you just know that it is very, very slow,

not to give up hope at all.

It's much more profound than one film,

or one this, or one that.

It is a slow progression

and it demands internal change on everyone's part

if we want the change to happen.

[inspiring music]