The Sympathizer: How That “Mindfuck” of a Steakhouse Scene Came Together
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The post The Sympathizer: How That “Mindfuck” of a Steakhouse Scene Came Together appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Sympathizer Episode 3, “Love It or Leave It.”]
The most buzzy aspect of HBO’s new drama The Sympathizer — Robert Downey Jr. playing a series of different characters — hits its peak in Episode 3, “Love It or Leave It.” And even cast member Sandra Oh had questions about one key sequence: During a roundtable interview with her, series star Hoa Xuande, and members of the press, she turned to Xuande mid-interview to ask about the details herself. “Did you rehearse all of it? Who did you start with?”
She was asking specifically about what cast and producers referred to as “the steakhouse scene,” where four of Downey’s different characters come together for an increasingly surreal conversation with The Captain (Xuande), a Vietnamese double agent trying to get his bearing in the chaos following the Vietnam War. Clear digital trickery is involved in bringing together Downey’s various personas — CIA agent Claude, Professor Hammer, filmmaker Niko, and Congressman Ned — for a sequence that required three days of shooting, but was essential to the production.
According to executive producer Susan Downey, “Robert never wanted [the multiple roles] to be some sort of gimmicky idea. He didn’t want it to just be, ‘Oh, this was my Peter Sellers moment. I need to have a real reason that a single actor’s playing these four roles.'”
That reason came, co-showrunner Don McKellar said, out of conversations about how “there’s this recurring motif in The Captain’s life — these sort of patronizing American establishment characters who offer The Captain something and offer to help him and then end up betraying him or being duplicitous. These extravagant sort of archetypes of the American establishment, who all work together, have a common interest, are all members of the same club, like we show in Episode 3. And so we were thinking, how do we evoke that? How do we show the complicity between these characters without, you know, slamming it on the head with dialogue?”
Hence, the multi-casting idea, which executive producer Niv Fichman said made the source material’s author Viet Thanh Nguyen jealous, because “he couldn’t do that in a book.”
The Sympathizer (HBO)
Susan said that Nguyen “signed off on how the characters existed in the script and what they were meant to represent. And I think with that, he then turned it over to Robert and director Park to really breathe them to life. Robert is a huge history buff, and so he came in with very specific influences for each of these characters, but it was very much a collaborative process with director Park in fully realizing what they were going to look like, sound like, all of those kind of things.”
Director Park Chan-wook said that the choice created “a symbol of an America that has four different faces. So it was very important to find the exact fine line in portraying this idea, because the important thing was they couldn’t be drastically different, all four of them at the same time. We wanted to make sure that people can read that it is only one actor playing multiple roles.”
As McKellar added, “it reminds us that this is very subjective from The Captain’s point of view. He’s seeing all these men as somehow fundamentally the same, even though they’re ideologically opposed.”
For Park, the steakhouse scene was where this idea really came together for him: “Watching multiple characters in the same place, that was what I wanted to actually explore. Because when we see each of the characters individually, perhaps the audience is well aware that one actor is portraying multiple roles, but at that particular moment, they might forget about that and they only see the actor as that particular character. But when we see, when we gather all of them at one place, it’s undeniable. And people will directly relate to the idea that we were trying to portray.”
Let’s go back to Oh’s questions for Xuande about the steakhouse scene, beginning with which Robert Downey Jr. persona was filmed first. “I think I started with Claude,” Xuande said. “Claude is the most prominent of characters, so I felt most comfortable there. And he is obviously sitting right next to me, so it’s the easiest to shoot.”
Xuande shot the scene multiple times with each different iteration of Robert’s character, filming his own coverage at the same time: “It was always on me and one of the other characters.” Body doubles were used for the other characters Robert couldn’t play in the moment, with the first AD reading out their lines.
“It was just such a like a mindfuck, so to speak,” Xuande said. “Because when you have your first AD reading these lines, it’s just these lines. But when you see Robert do it, he comes alive. He’s got his thing.”
The Sympathizer (HBO)
They didn’t rehearse with every different character, Xuande continued, “so I just had to sort of imagine how his other characters would do their lines. It was kind of like trial and error: As Robert stepped into his different characters, he would give different nuances of how he would deliver his lines, and I would have different reactions to takes. But it was just really fun to see Robert probably having an aneurysm going through his different characters in three days, and then just trying to keep up with him: ‘Hang on, who am I talking to at this time?'”
“He’s so skilled and so loose,” Oh said. “It’s really amazing to watch.”
Other cast members who worked with Robert agreed — as Vy Le, one of the show’s younger cast members, noted, “I don’t know how he does it. I mean, I’m a newbie and it’s difficult for me to just play the one role, but to be able to pull off all four and they’re so distinctly different — it’s insane.”
For Ky Duyen, who plays the General’s wife, “I met him as Claude, and it’s hard for me to think of him as any anyone else, because he’s so good. In that moment, he is that person. It’s watching mastery at work and I’ve learned so much. And beside that, he is just the nicest person. Mm-Hmm. So nice, so encouraging. So nurturing, he takes care of all the cast, and I can tell that he really cares.”
Added co-star Toan Le, “I could never really tell what Robert was going to do. The first time I saw Robert doing the Congressman, I didn’t think it was Robert — everything about the character is so markedly different from other characters that he does. He would just gesture or, you know, the hand movement is different. It was mind-blowing to watch him work, to tell the truth.”
Logistically, Susan said that it wasn’t super challenging to execute the shifts in character. “I mean, he happily shaved his head. I think he’d been looking for an excuse to do it, which I bring up because it cuts down the time of getting ready,” she said. “And there were a couple days where in the morning he had to play one character, and in the afternoon he had to play another. But other than that, there weren’t any true logistic challenges. He really enjoyed their kind of ugly American nature — but finding the humor, finding the pathos, at least a little bit, in each of them.”
Fichman chuckled at that. “She says that casually, but it couldn’t have happened without the genius of her husband, because he can snap from one to the other.”
“There’s that too,” Susan laughed.
“And we had an incredible team, that scheduled it properly,” Fichman continued. “So honestly, there weren’t any [logistical issues]. But only because of the people involved.”
New episodes of The Sympathizer debut Sundays on HBO.
The Sympathizer: How That “Mindfuck” of a Steakhouse Scene Came Together
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