With 'Expats,' Lulu Wang Tests the Limits of Love
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“In many ways,” Lulu Wang says, “we are actually less tolerant of the people closest to us.” It’s a November morning, and the writer and director is speaking from her family home in Atlanta. Her own clan is about to embark on a tropical vacation to celebrate a milestone birthday of her mother’s, but it isn’t her parents or brother she’s talking about. Wang, who shot to fame thanks to her award-winning 2019 film The Farewell, about a young woman’s trip to say goodbye to her grandmother, is discussing the driving force behind her first television series, Expats, which debuts January 26 on Prime Video.
Expats, which stars Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, Ji-young Yoo, and Jack Huston, is based on Janice Y.K. Lee’s novel The Expatriates and follows an expat couple in Hong Kong who experience an unimaginable loss that sends shockwaves through their seemingly glittering social group and upends the already tricky dynamics of their extended family.
“My parents and I are immigrants from China, so that forged a bond between us that is really strong,” Wang says. “What interested me about Expats is the way tragedy breaks a family and brings it together at the same time. This is a story about resilience, how you deal with ambiguous loss, and the notion of home when you’re not in the place where you were born and raised.”
Homesickness was something Wang, who lives in Los Angeles, and her cast and crew could relate to while filming in Hong Kong. It’s a cliché to say a group became like a family working on a television series, but Wang’s global gang—consisting of Americans, Australians, Hong Kongers, Koreans, Spaniards, and more—banded together to make the city feel like their own. “The universal thing to all cultures, especially when you’re working hard, is drinking,” she says with a laugh. “We threw birthday parties for each other, and all of our meetings would be in a little café where we got to know the owners. They’d be like, ‘You guys again?’”
With such intense drama playing out on camera, it’s no wonder they needed the breaks. The limited series not only charts the relationships between parents and children, it gazes inside marriages and the intricacies of extended clans, and what it means to build a chosen family and hold it together. It’s a thorny subject that clearly captivates Wang (whose slate of upcoming projects includes the titles Family Meal, Close-knit, and Children of the New World), as it has so many storytellers. “I’m really interested in questions around family, and I’m not sure why,” she says. “It’s just instinctual for me.”
This story appears in the February 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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