Stephanie Hsu's Oscar Celebration Will Include a Nice Long Walk
Everything Everywhere All at Once actor Stephanie Hsu was flying high, literally, when she heard about her Oscar nomination for best supporting actress, returning to Los Angeles on a flight from Australia. She had started out the flight by watching her film one more time. “It was like a ritual, just to kind of say, no matter what happened, that what we made was something special,” she tells Vanity Fair. “And to be able to return to the actual work itself and kind of see how much has happened since we made that movie.”
As she was landing, the nominations were being announced, and her phone started buzzing nonstop. Her category was the first to be announced on Tuesday morning, making her a first-time Oscar nominee for playing the dual roles of Joy and villain Jobu in the multiverse-jumping epic about an Asian American family. By the end of the nominations announcement, the A24 movie would land 11 nominations, the most of any film. “It feels really special,” she says. “This movie, as we probably can’t shut up about, was such a labor of love and it was such a group effort. And so it only feels right that we get to celebrate if a lot of us get to celebrate together.”
The nominations include best picture, directing, original screenplay, and acting nods for Hsu as well as Ke Huy Quan, and Michelle Yeoh, who play her parents. When asked which of the nominations surprised her the most, Hsu says with a laugh, “I mean, me?” But she says she was especially happy to see costume designer Shirley Kurata nominated because she had worked so closely with her on creating Jobu’s avant-garde looks. “What I’m learning is a lot of this stuff is very political, and she wasn’t pounding the pavement, like, campaigning for herself. I feel really happy and proud that her work was celebrated because I know that she is shy, but I also know that she’s brilliant.”
Stephanie Hsu in Everything Everywhere All At Once, 2022.By Allyson Riggs / A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection.
Hsu’s category includes her costar Jamie Lee Curtis, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Angela Bassett, The Banshees of Inisherin’s Kerry Condon, and The Whale’s Hong Chau. With Hsu, Chau, Quan, and Yeoh, this year’s acting lineup is the most actors of Asian descent to ever be nominated, a milestone not lost on Hsu. “I’m so honored and excited to be one person who represents this moment that I never got to see when I was a kid,” she says. “I’m just so happy and proud to be alongside these people to celebrate, to acknowledge that we have come very far and we have much further to go.”
In particular, Hsu calls Yeoh’s nomination “a really big deal.” The veteran actor is the first Asian actor to even be nominated in the lead-actress category. (Merle Oberon, who was nominated in 1936, hid her partial South Asian heritage and passed herself off as white). “I feel really proud to get to be on this journey alongside [Yeoh] and be grateful for her and get to internally celebrate her as we go through this last push.”
Still, there’s a long way to go when it comes to representation. Only two women of Asian descent have ever won Hsu’s category (Minari’s Yuh-Jung Youn in 2021 and Sayonara’s Miyoshi Umeki in 1958), and only one woman of color has ever won the lead-actress category (Halle Berry in 2002 for Monster’s Ball). “It’s not a statistic that you necessarily wanna keep harping on, but, just for myself and in my own healing, or in my own realization of how much I have internalized that there has been no space for me or that there could not be a place for me, I think back to that statistic and say, ‘What I’m feeling internally is not something I’ve fabricated in my mind. It is actually mathematically real,’” she says.
