“When I opened that page and saw that her name is a Korean name,” Sandra Oh tells me over Zoom, “It really righted something in myself. I recognized it because the character was recognizing me. So the way that I was able to meet the character was much more curious, much more open.”There’s a story Oh tells about realizing that she was being asked to play the initially mild-mannered MI6 agent Eve Polastri, the lead character in Killing Eve. Even after decades of acting, five Emmy nominations, and a Golden Globe win, she initially couldn’t understand which role she was being offered in the gruesome and sexy BBC psycho-drama. She’d played sidekicks and best friends, teachers and politicians. But not since her early days in the Canadian film and television scene of the 1990s had she played a title character. “When I started working professionally, I was about 14, 15. Immediately, I could never go for any lead parts. As a young person of color, your world is being shaped deeply unconsciously,” says Oh, who was raised in Ottawa by her Korean immigrant parents. “It takes a lifetime to free yourself from your own diminished sense of possibility.” But this isn’t the story of Sandra Oh being offered her first series lead role—this is the story of Sandra Oh being offered what would become her second series lead role. By the time the script for Netflix’s campus dramedy The Chair crossed her path, a few years of post Killing-Eve accolades… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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Sandra Oh Is Agitating for Real, Culture-Changing Inclusion
