Sandra Oh enters comedy space with ‘The Chair’

Sandra Oh has been dancing with death and serial killer Villanelle on ‘Killing Eve’ since 2018, so she could do with a laugh.

The Canadian-American actor took on the role of Professor Ji-Yoon Kim, the newly appointed head professor of the English department of a prestigious yet struggling school in Netflix’s comedy-drama series ‘The Chair’.

It is understandable how the dark elements of Killing Eve can be overwhelming, so the actor had been wanting to live in a comedy space, she told AP. 

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The six-episode ‘The Chair’ premiered on Friday. The show blends humor with the daunting challenges that Ji-Yoon faces at a school beset by financial woes and generational clashes.

Enrollment in the English department is down and most of the professors are older, white and stuck in their ways — which doesn’t go down well with the politically correct students of Pembroke University. Even her relationship with her daughter is rocky. 

“I moved into the mother part of my career, and usually it’s kind of been a death knell for actresses,” Oh said. “I realize it’s because the parts for the mother aren’t that great. But the ones that I am playing are very full, multidimensional and rich to play.”

Sandra Oh never attended college. However, it was not the show’s focus on academia that attracted her, it was the name of her character that she could relate to, being a Canadian-born daughter of South Korean immigrants.

“I can, very slowly over my career, note the change that has happened, to be actually able to put a Korean name and have all the characters say your name. It really appealed to me,” she said. “It says something because it normalizes things that you don’t realize that in everyday life (are) normal. So it needs to be normalized on screen.”

“The Chair” was filming in Pittsburgh in March when a series of shootings in the Atlanta-area left eight people dead, six of whom were women of Asian descent. Oh felt compelled to make her voice heard at an anti-violence rally on a Pittsburgh street corner.

“I just knew I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to gather with other Asian people,” she said. She discussed it with the cast and crew, “who really responded so beautifully because these things are important to them as well. So even though it was a tricky time during Covid, because we still need to do our jobs and continue shooting, it was very important to all of us to be in (the) community and to hear each other.”

Following the anti-Asian crimes in the US, Sandra aims to make a difference through her portrayal of South Asian women in cinema. 

“I feel like what I can do in my work far outweighs anything that I could possibly say in a rally or a tweet or even in an essay, because that’s not the medium that I am at my best, that I feel I can communicate the most in.”

With Inputs from AP