Yong Ok Lee (‘Expats’ production designer): ‘I don’t want to distract from the story, as my purpose is always to support the characters’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

“I don’t want to distract from the story, as my purpose is always to support the characters. But because we are showing Hong Kong a lot, I also wanted to make sure I show Hong Kong in the right perspective” explains production designer Yong Ok Lee about designing the sets for Amazon Prime Video’s limited series “Expats.” For our recent webchat the Korean designer adds, “I’m not Cantonese. I don’t know their culture,” noting that she “researched a lot of the background about Hong Kong politics, society and economy, but also I wanted to make sure that I can balance between an expat and a local perspective, because it’s not all about Hong Kong locals, it’s also about expats from their perspective.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

SEE ‘Expats’ review round-up: Nicole Kidman is ‘mesmerizing’ in Prime Video’s new limited series

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“Expats” was created and directed by BAFTA nominee Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”), based on the 2016 novel “The Expatriates” by Janice Y. K. Lee. The six-episode drama revolves around three expatriate women and the people that orbit their lives. Oscar and Emmy winner Nicole Kidman (“The Hours,” “Big Little Lies”) stars as Margaret, an American expatriate living in Hong Kong when tragedy befalls her family. The series co-stars Sarayu Blue as Margaret’s neighbor Hilary, struggling with her overbearing parents and inability to fall pregnant, Ji-young Yoo as troubled Korean expat Mercy who is befriended by Margaret after a chance encounter, Jack Huston (“Boardwalk Empire”) as Hilary’s cheating husband David and Brian Tee (“Chicago Med”) as Margaret’s grief-stricken husband Clarke.

The series is set amid the protests that engulfed Hong Kong in 2014, exploring the impacts of grief and loss on this group of people that are living far away from home. As production designer, Lee was tasked with accurately portraying Hong Kong from ten years ago, while partially shooting the show in L.A. after the pandemic meant they had to return to the U.S., which the production designer says was all part of a huge undertaking for the creative team. By the pivotal fourth episode of the series, Margaret and Clarke find themselves at a morgue on the mainland, which Lee says was one of the more deceivingly complex sets that she created. These scenes are intentionally brutal and uncomfortable, partly (and perhaps subconsciously) because of Lee’s attention to detail, rendering the morgue as a stark, austere and unfriendly environment, the stuff of nightmares for desperate parents looking for answers. Lee says she leaned in to being less concerned about realism, and more about leaving the audience feeling uncomfortable and unsettled. “We made the space like a maze,” she says about the set, which included the existing location and building “three different rooms; two waiting rooms and then little bit of hallway and then the cold-room,” she explains, so that the audience might feel as lost and confused as the characters expecting the worst.

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