46 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
that I had to give,” she said. One of her
professors, Jennie Israel, recalling Wu’s
drive, described “fire coming off her in
determination.”
While Wu was in college, her par-
ents divorced. It was a painful and con-
fusing time that Wu doesn’t like to talk
about, and I noticed that she slipped
into an abstracted third person when
discussing it. “Eighteen to twenty-one
is a hard time for the showbiz-starving
kid whose parents just got divorced, so
she doesn’t exactly, like, know what home
she’s coming back to,” she said.
Wu is generally reluctant to talk about
her family, particularly her mother, whom
she has gnomically described as “whim-
sical.” Eddie Huang was too loyal to Wu
to divulge details, but he inadvertently
let a hint slip. “Constance and I strug-
gle with our parents in a very similar
way,” he said. “My mom always thought
she knew best for me. And it was always
really a struggle to be able to be myself
at home with my mother around. She
was my first hater. And, you know, Con-
stance and I really relate.”
Wu graduated from Purchase, in 2005,
with a good agent. She moved to New
York, where she spent the next five years
waitressing and going to countless au-
ditions, which led to only a handful of
TV and Off Off Broadway roles. Still,
she remembers those years as a time of
self-discovery—she took a class in Vic-
torian literature, attended Quaker meet-
ing for a year, and contemplated a ca-
reer as a speech therapist—and she still
speaks passionately about the idealism
of the New York theatre world. She
moved to Los Angeles in 2010, after a
bad breakup with a boyfriend, but for
several years her life continued much
the same in the new location: waitress-
ing, auditions, sporadic roles. “At one
point, I asked myself if I would be O.K.
waitressing at forty-five as long as I got
to do acting,” Wu told me. “My answer
was a firm yes.”
O
ne afternoon, a week or so before
the movie shoot in Hawaii, I ac-
companied Wu to visit her acting coach,
Craig Archibald, in the Hancock Park
neighborhood of Los Angeles. Ar-
chibald, an affable Canadian in his mid-
fifties, greeted us at the door of his
Spanish-style duplex home, where he
lives and teaches. After serving us gen-
erous mugs of tea, he turned to his cli-
ent. “So, tell me how you are doing,” he
said. Wu drew a long breath and curled
herself into a deep red sofa.
“I’m having a day,” she said, pulling
a notebook and a pen out of a black
leather backpack.
“O.K., so, a day,” Archibald said
slowly. “Business day or personal day?”
“Both,” Wu replied. She had spent
the morning writing in her journal,
which, she said, always gets “rather
emotional,” and had done a number
of interviews for the imminent release
of “Hustlers.” Archibald asked if she
planned to see the movie, and she
laughed. “I don’t like to watch myself,”
she said. “All the exposure just makes
me yucky.”
Archibald, who has the soothing
voice of a mindfulness-app guide, had
a therapeutic habit of repeating Wu’s
words, as if to make sure that she had
heard herself and given adequate weight
to her own ideas. I got the impression
that a significant part of the work was
buttressing Wu’s confidence, letting her
work out thoughts and emotions in a
protected environment. Wu has been
attending coaching sessions with Ar-
chibald since shortly after she arrived
in L.A.—long before she could afford
it. During her waitressing years, she’d
bring audition pieces to rehearse, but
now she looks to Archibald for help in-
habiting a character she’s playing by in-
venting a backstory or developing an
interior world.
Wu told Archibald that she had yet
to meet the woman who would be play-
ing a younger version of her character,
Grace, in “I Was a Simple Man.” “I’m
concerned, because I don’t know how
she sounds,” Wu said, haltingly. “She’s
not an actress, she has never acted be-
fore.” (“Oof,” Archibald said, with raised
brows.) “We’ve done so much on Grace’s
spirit and her inner life,” Wu went on.
“But that’s all work that we’ve done that
isn’t in the other actress.”
“You can talk to her, you know?” Ar-
chibald said. “She’s gonna be very re-
spectful of you.”
“Will she, though?” Wu asked.
“Of course she will,” Archibald said.
“No, she won’t,” Wu protested, with-
out conviction.
Wu’s intensity brought with it a cer-
tain distractibility. When a lawnmower
began rumbling outside, Archibald apol-
ogized and explained that yard work was
normally done in the morning, but the
crew had arrived late. Wu almost vi-
brated with agitation. “Oh, my God, it’s
just so loud!” she exclaimed at one point,
as if the mower had been dispatched ex-
pressly to thwart her concentration.
Soon she turned to me, her face
darkening. “I’m honestly distracted be-
cause of you,” she said. I had been tap-
ping out notes on my phone on a couch
off to the side. “Are you actually tak-
ing notes, or are you texting people or
doing something else?” she asked. Un-
sure whether “yes” or “no” would an-
tagonize her more, I said, weakly, “A
bit of both.” Wrong answer.
“Because, here, what we say has a lot
of reverence,” she continued, frowning.
“Pay attention.” In our subsequent en-
counters, Wu spoke directly into my
phone, as if recording an audiobook.
Archibald moved us to a quieter room
to resume the exploration of Wu’s role.
He told me about one of the techniques
they use. “Very often, it’s helpful for ac-
tors to see themselves as either a plant
or an animal,” he said.
“Animal work is a big thing,” Wu
said.
Archibald explained that choosing
an animal that a role resembles “helps
you feel the essence of it.”
The pair had decided that, in this
film, Wu’s character was fundamentally
a plant. “In my mind, Grace, when she
dies, literally enters the soil and is put
at the base of this monkey-pod tree,”
Wu said. She added, grinning, “This is
the first time I’m being a plant!”
“This the first time you’re being a
plant,” Archibald affirmed serenely.
“But it works!” she cried, with an al-
most childlike glee.
A
cting is the art of animating fic-
tion. Slipping into a character is a
form of forgetting the self. But, whereas
Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt are given free
rein to channel the Everyman in Amer-
ican cinema, being a minority actress
often means auditioning for roles that
dwell on the specificity of the Asian-
American experience—roles that, for
the actor, can feel like a constant re-
minder of what sets her apart.
Wu’s character in “Crazy Rich Asians”
is an accomplished professor from a
