How ‘The Sympathizer’ Cast Represents a Portrait of the Modern Vietnamese Diaspora

Projects about the Vietnam War and its aftermath are so plentiful as to be practically their own genre, and they’ve starred a who’s who of Hollywood icons, including John Wayne, Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Robin Williams, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson and Christian Bale.

Notably missing from the casts — at least among the substantive speaking parts — have been performers of actual Vietnamese descent. That’s finally changed with The Sympathizer, HBO and A24’s limited series adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel. Robert Downey Jr. (who also executive produces) and Sandra Oh are the big names involved, but they are led by relative newcomer Hoa Xuande and joined by Vietnamese costars to tell a story about spycraft and personal and collective identity immediately following the conflict, centering the people whose lives and country were torn apart as a result.

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The Hollywood Reporter spoke with eight of The Sympathizer’s Vietnamese cast members in a group conversation below that revealed that, although they all share the same ethnicity, they are diverse in age, nationality and experience, together forming a living account of the modern Vietnamese diaspora — what it has been through, and what it is like now.

The assembled ensemble and their characters:

Hoa Xuande as protagonist The Captain, a biracial French-Vietnamese police captain for South Vietnam who is secretly a mole for the communist North Vietnamese side.

Fred Nguyen Khan as Bon, one of The Captain’s two best friends. Bon is fiercely loyal to his friends and to the South Vietnamese cause, having lost his family to the communists.

Duy Nguyen as Man, The Captain’s other best friend, who is also his North Vietnamese handler.

Toan Le as The General, ostensibly The Captain’s boss, who attempts to maintain morale among the exiled South Vietnamese in southern California.

Ky Duyen as Madame, The General’s wife, who may not have her husband’s official title but carries just as much authority among the community. (In a twist of life imitating art imitating life, the character of The General is at least partially inspired by Ky Duyen’s real-life father.)

Vy Le as Lana, The General and Madame’s daughter, who seeks independence in her new life in America.

Phanxinê as The Major, a friendly and enterprising former South Vietnamese officer on his way to building the American dream for his family when The Captain frames him as part of The General’s hunt for the North Vietnamese mole.

Kieu Chinh as The Major’s Mother, whom he continues to dote on from Vietnam to their new home in America.

While Kieu Chinh (already an established actress before continuing her career in the U.S., with credits like The Joy Luck Club), Toan Le and Ky Duyen lived through the 1975 fall of Saigon and have their own memories of fleeing their homeland, Phanxinê, Nguyen and Vy Le were born and raised in postwar Vietnam. Meanwhile, Xuande and Nguyen Khan were born in Australia and Canada, respectively, to immigrants displaced by the conflict.

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What was it like filming the fall of Saigon in the pilot episode, compared to either your direct experience or your understanding of it?

KIEU CHINH I’m the oldest among the cast here. I was born in the north and left to the south and became a refugee within my own country at the age of 15 [after the 1954 Geneva accords partitioned Vietnam], so I am like a living witness of history, from the French moving out to the Americans moving in. The last weeks of April [1975], I was filming in Singapore and then they kicked me out of the country [as the South Vietnamese government began to collapse and her passport was no longer recognized]. I had no place to go, so the [film] company and all the actors in my movie raised funds to buy a very expensive ticket for me to fly around the world buying time, waiting for Saigon to fall so I could land wherever and become a refugee. I went to Bangkok, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, London, France, New York. I landed in Toronto at 6 p.m. on the 30^th of April, where an immigration officer stamped my passport, saying, “Kieu Chinh, you are the first Vietnamese refugee in Canada.”

KY DUYEN Living in Vietnam when I was 9, I was not aware of what was going on. We left on the 29th. My mother the night before had given me a box of family photos that I was supposed to take with me, but someone just picked me up at three or four in the morning while I was asleep. So I left the treasure at home and went on the C-130. I don’t remember the bombs; the last thing I remember is my mom’s face as the belly of the plane was closing up. She was just looking out with a look of utter loss. She wasn’t even crying a lot; her face was very calm. But a silent tear just rolled down.

TOAN LE [Filming the evacuation sequence] was very surreal. Also, it was a night shoot so it was extra surreal. But it took me back. I left on April 28, 1975, when I was 15. My family and I hopped on a bus to the airport, drove right up to a C-130, went up on a ramp and flew to Guam. It was a day or so before things got really bad at the airport. I looked out the window on the bus and saw students in white áo dài riding their bicycles to school. It was business as usual, peaceful, the sun was shining, and here I was, boarding a plane that was going to take me away forever. I think the trauma of that is still very hidden for me, but I did feel that evening when we were filming, it just seemed very ominous to me, thick and dark.

FRED NGUYEN KHAN The idea that our parents went through this while we were performing made it really difficult for us to just enjoy the moment of being an actor on a big set. It felt kind of like, Is this even ok to do? This is probably the worst day in their lives and we’re just living our dream, pursuing acting. But it’s because of them that we were able to do this, so in a way I’m really happy that this show portrayed these characters and told the story with so much empathy and with respect.

HOA XUANDE I brought my parents to the premiere. I just wanted to get their take on what they were seeing on the screen, especially in the last 15 to 20 minutes of the first episode. I was watching them and I could feel them getting emotional and I saw sort of a tear forming in the corner of my mom’s eye. Afterwards when I was talking to them about it, they were like, it brought them back to that. So I think the depiction that we’d been able to create in the last 20 minutes of the first episode is actually very close to being accurate, and it’s a wonderful depiction of the struggles and raw survival of people trying to survive this devastation that often we don’t see.

VY LE My dad was born in ‘70 and my mom in ‘75, so they were very young when Saigon fell. It was never really a conversation in our family or a narrative that we were familiar with. Shooting the show was a huge learning experience. Sitting in classrooms in Vietnam, I learned about it through the communists’ point of view. I knew of it as the American War, and the liberation of the South. And then having come to America [for school] and learning about it, it was in a way very mechanical and through the lens of the American people, and so this was the first time that felt like it was the missing piece of the puzzle that really rounded me out.

How does the Vietnam you know or knew compare to the version typically depicted in Hollywood?

PHANXINÊ I was born after the war, so it’s hard for me to say if [a given account] is true or not. But I think this one is very different from other Hollywood movies in that I feel all these characters are real people instead of just clowns or villains or extras in the background. A lot of Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War make Vietnamese people look ridiculous.

DUY NGUYEN I grew up in Hanoi. We didn’t watch a lot of war movies. I grew up decades after the war; my family has really moved on from it. So war movies, especially from the American perspective, are not very popular. But my family watched [some], and we often laughed about them. To see this from the South Vietnamese perspective and then the plane sequence and what happened afterwards, this is my first time getting exposed to it. Seeing it and hearing from my cast members that that actually happened kind of blew my mind. It’s really opened my mind up to what else happened back then.

What were your acting opportunities like before The Sympathizer?

KIEU CHINH This year marks my 68th year in the industry. When I came here, I was lucky enough to land my very first job [in the U.S.] in M*A*S*H. Alan Alda wrote the episode for me, so I was very lucky that I landed in that. After that I kept busy with so many stories about Vietnam: China Beach, Hamburger Hill. And I’ve played all different Asian nationalities. In M*A*S*H I was a Korean, The Letter with Lee Remick I played a Chinese mistress, and I even worked in India playing an Indian princess.

NGUYEN This is actually my first time playing Vietnamese. I’ve been cast as mostly Chinese, actually. One time I got cast, and they’re like, “We haven’t figured out the identity of the character yet, so if you have any suggestions…” I said, “I’m Vietnamese, so just put him as Vietnamese.” Then I came on set and my name was Billy Wong.

Phanxinê, you are actually a working director in Vietnam. How did you come to make your acting debut in an American series?

PHANXINÊ I heard about the book, but I didn’t have a chance to read it because it never published in Vietnam. Viet Thanh Nguyen posted about the open casting on his Facebook and I wanted to submit an audition just to send a love letter to [co-showrunner] Park Chan-wook. In my tape, I wore a pin of one of his movies, Oldboy, and for the introduction I said, “I really admire your work, Director Park.” But I also planned to do kind of a prank on my friends, because the casting description said, “Nudity required,” so I’m thinking, I’m going to apply for this so when the show comes out, I will tell my friends, “You were supposed to see me naked onscreen, but unfortunately they didn’t pick me.” But then the plan went wrong.

You might be the first person who’s ever landed a big role after auditioning as a joke.

XUANDE Yeah, we killed ourselves auditioning for this, and he just did it as a joke!

NGUYEN KHAN We auditioned for nine months!

Given the political sensitivities to the material, do you have any concerns about your ability to continue to work in Vietnam as a result of participating in this project?

PHANXINÊ A lot of people, my friends, they’re concerned for me. But I took this because I think it’s an important project for Vietnamese people in Vietnam and around the world. And this book doesn’t just laugh at the Vietnamese Vietnamese, but also Vietnamese Americans and [non-Vietnamese] Americans. It’s a satire. I hope the book and then also the series will spark a conversation that we’ve tried not to discuss for years. So I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want to worry about something that hasn’t happened yet.

What kinds of responses to this story have you gotten from family members or other Vietnamese people who lived this experience?

NGUYEN KHAN My family didn’t really like to talk about the trauma that they endured. As a kid, all you know is the result of that trauma by the way that they are sometimes very absent, sometimes very strict. All they know is how to survive and get results in order to survive. And for their son to want to be an actor, it’s such a weird idea for people who went through all that.

XUANDE “We struggled and survived so you could do this?!”

NGUYEN KHAN Exactly. Now after the shoots I understand them more, because we basically played them. It was only after we wrapped that I was able to start talking about it. My grandmother felt like, “Ok, it’s time to tell the story about how we escaped.” And it was a really surreal moment because we never even thought about asking about this stuff before.

TOAN LE My parents never talked about it. After all these years, we barely uttered a word regarding what happened to us: what happened that day, what time did we leave, things like that. So everything is largely forgotten. Throughout all these years I felt the muffled-ness of the suffering, just watching them trying to go on after losing everything. It’s like war happens on the battlefield, and then it happens again in memory.

NGUYEN KHAN There were a lot of people on the set who actually went through these things, and it felt very cathartic for them to revisit these situations. It sparked a conversation for healing, in that sense. Just the fact that I was able to ask questions to my family after the show, I think it’s a really good opportunity to start talking about it and healing in a way that’s healthy. I think that’s a real possibility.

XUANDE The Vietnamese diaspora that’s spread across the world are predominantly people who fled the war from the South. These people had to make a new life for themselves all around the globe and they had to repress a lot of their trauma because they weren’t ever really given the medium or the ability to express that devastation, so they had to just move on. So I think the wider Vietnamese diaspora would be interested in seeing something like this that is finally capturing something that they have felt like has been treated as so insignificant when it comes to portraying the Vietnam War. I think they’re excited to see a Vietnamese cast telling their story back to them from their perspective, so that they can at least, like Fred said, deal with it in a cathartic way, to finally see that their trauma really does matter.

You shot in Thailand as a stand-in for Vietnam, but after production wrapped, a bunch of you went to Vietnam together on vacation. Who was on that trip?

XUANDE It was Duy, me, Fred, Vy, Alan [Trong, who plays the journalist Sonny], Phanxinê, Kayli [Tran], who plays the Communist spy in the beginning, and a few crew members as well. Speaking for myself, I thought I’d take the trip because we were so close – we were only in Thailand when we wrapped, and secondly in case the government decided not to let us in after the show, we thought we’d make a quick reconnaissance mission.

NGUYEN It took a bit of convincing for this guy [Xuande] to come along, actually. He was like, “Oh, I’m just gonna go for two weeks,” and then he ended up staying for the whole month.

XUANDE Because I just wanted to torture these guys some more.

NGUYEN KHAN I went when I was around 19 years old, but I was there with my family and so I had to follow them around and do whatever they were doing. This time I thought, “This is really cool, I get to go there as an adult and just do what I want to.” I ended up having insomnia so I couldn’t do anything.

XUANDE We dragged him to a few things, though.

What are your hopes going forward for yourselves, or for other Vietnamese in this industry?

KY DUYEN I am still hosting [mega-popular diasporic Vietnamese variety series Paris By Night] but I have been wanting to wind down from that — I’ve been doing that 30 years — and to segue into something else. Kieu Chinh was the one who introduced me to my agent, and then my agent’s the one who sent me the sides to read for The Sympathizer. I’m so lucky, it was the second project I tried out for, and I got the role. And yes, I hope that I can go into acting full-time.

TOAN LE I hope that dialogues will be generated. For myself, I hope that this will bring me more work, because as soon as I got this job, I quit my other job as a visual designer. I’m just a full-time actor now. So I hope there’ll be more opportunities for Vietnamese actors in general.

XUANDE The big takeaway is if we just treat auditions like they’re jokes, we’ll book all the roles.

The Sympathizer releases new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.

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