While Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood is a gorgeous retelling of ambitious youngsters looking to make it on the silver screen, there is an ugliness about how the people of color and queer people are treated at the beginning of the limited series. When Laura Harrier’s character asks an employee of a studio if she can audition for a certain part, she is told, ‘That’s a white role, sweetie,’ and Jeremy Pope’s Archie writes a script from the perspective of a white woman just to get his foot in the door. The Netflix series makes some bold choices, but one of the best is including Anna May Wong in an arc that grants the legendary star the credit she was never afforded.
Michelle Krusiec embodies Wong with a quiet strength in an industry that doesn’t allow her to make the leap to the star that she deserves to be. For those who are unaware, Wong was looked over for the role of O-Lan in the 1937 film, The Good Earth, and Luise Rainer, a Caucasian actress, won Best Actress at the Academy Awards. In one of Hollywood’s most heartbreaking moments, Wong watches Rainer walk to the stage to accept her second Oscar, her eyes welling with tears for the opportunity she wasn’t given.
What would happen if the industry didn’t follow the rules put in place to stop women and people of color from advancing in the industry? It’s not that people are given the chance and then they fail—no one gives them a job in the first place. When Darren Criss’s character gives Wong a chance to perform in a supporting role in his first film, she even doubts that she will be taken seriously again. It’s a beautifully simple decision to lift someone up when they shouldn’t have been down in the first place.
Awards Daily: Hollywood does things that I didn’t expect.
Michelle Krusiec: I think it’s a really beautiful show.
AD: I feel like there’s sort of an Anna May Wong renaissance right now.
MK: There is.
AD: Stephen Tapert mentions her in his great book Best Actress: The History of Oscar-Winning Women in his chapter about Luise Rainer, and the YouTube channel, Be Kind Rewind, devoted an entire episode to the relationship the Academy has with Asian actors. Those both came out in the last few months, so I was thrilled to see you come on screen as Anna.
MK: Thank you!
AD: When you are to play a titan like Anna May Wong, where do you start?
MK: I had the same reaction to be honest. I was a little daunted by it. I always start with research and because she was a living person, that was exciting because generally there was more information. There was actually very little that I could actually find of her in interviews. I sort of imagined what she may have sounded without her Anna May Wong presence. That was something that director Dan Minahan and I talked about.
AD: Really?
MK: Yeah. Is she doing her own Mid-Atlantic even when she’s with Darren Criss’s character. We were trying to figure out who she was without the glamour and iconic imagery. First, I tried to watch as much as I could on her. I tried to find any kind of audio where I could hear her speak in her actual voice. I found a documentary that she did where she went to China and it makes her kind of advanced. She was actually a documentarian! I tried to really separate what I could find as her in character from what I could find where she was herself.
AD: With that iconic status removed?
MK: Yeah. And I felt that her bigger films, the ones she’s more well-known for and even smaller appearances, was the exotic version of her and when she did more B-films, I felt I saw more of who she really was. I really tried to hone those two tones.
AD: There is a moment where you are wiping makeup off your face before the screen test for The Good Earth and you say, ‘You don’t have to make me look Asian—I am Asian.’ Tell me about that moment, because it’s something that could feel like a throwaway line but it has huge implications.
MK: I hope I don’t sound too sentimental or emotional, but it was a very truthful part. I felt like Ryan [Murphy] wrote and gave me dialogue that I would’ve said many times in my career. It felt like the lineage that he was creating was so close to home. I must’ve said that line to myself thousands of times. I don’t think I’ve been able to articulate that frustration beyond maybe my inner circle. Very early on in my career, I often found myself in the position for every part of having to sit there and be made up in a way that someone thought that they’d heighten your features or bring out something they thought was Asian about. Whatever they are interpreting about your face is something I’d come across. It always challenged my own perception of what a Westernized vision of beauty of Asian people. A lot of times, I did find, people would want to make my eyes more slanted or heighten my face in a way that I thought was unflattering.
AD: Wow.
MK: It’s always an uncomfortable talk and now I feel more empowered to say something about it.
AD: You have two moments where you create Anna May—one is at the beginning and one is the end. For the screen test for The Good Earth, what was recreating that like?
MK: Yeah. That was a powerful scene.
AD: Yeah.
MK: I couldn’t find any historical footage of whether she actually did screen test. They had already cast the male at that time.
AD: Oh, that’s right.
MK: Once they cast Paul Muni, she couldn’t play opposite him because he was Caucasian. I believe it’s fictional what we portray in the series. There was a little research where I imagine they allowed her to audition for a smaller part. But I don’t know if that was true. This was kind of what Ryan created—to blow everyone away with the audition. They re-created that scene, and I think I am actually wearing clothes from the production. They are so specific, and we thought they looked so original. It felt so authentic. I looked at Luise Rainer’s performance in terms of what they would’ve cast and I watched what she did with it and made my own interpretation of what Anna May Wong [would have done]. That was really hard to watch that film as a Chinese person because there’s so much whitewashed characters.
AD: Yeah.
MK: I tried to bring what values I thought Anna would bring to the role that only a Chinese person could’ve brought that I felt specific to her own personal experience. I think she longed to be a mother. That scene specifically talks about the ownership of land and that translated for me personally with a question of who belongs here in America. Do you have a right to this land? If I was here working on this land for 40 years, are you telling me I don’t own it? It’s a question of point of origin and I translated that scene very personally in terms of how I felt someone could tell me that I couldn’t belong or I couldn’t have the right to own something.
AD: And the entire time you’re holding that baby.
MK: Yes.
AD: I do remember that a teacher showed us The Good Earth in school. I’m not sure of the context but I do remember a few students asking about the whitewashing of it. They didn’t understand it.
MK: That’s good.
AD: I remember seeing Luise Rainer’s name on the box and people wondering why Rainer had that role. Because she’s clearly not Asian. Sorry that was a tangent.
MK: No, that is very encouraging. It’s nice that people would actually say something.
AD: I want to talk to about the ending. Can you tell me what that moment means to you? It feels like a gift to Anna May Wong.
MK: Yeah, I felt that Ryan was righting the wrongs against her. I wanted to honor that, and I felt that the whole time I was playing her in that I was disappointed that people didn’t know who she was when I’d mention her. I felt protective and possessive of her. I didn’t realize that most people don’t know her. My approach to her was to show the world who she was. I wanted to give her the visibility that she warranted with all the work that she put in. She was in fashion for long and then she fell out, but now that she’s back in fashion, I just wanted people to have a glimpse of what her pain was. The fact that Ryan wanted to do this, it was a gift. It’s almost auspicious because the day that we shot a lot of her major scenes, Google doodled her for her 100th anniversary of her in film.
AD: I remember that!
MK: It was this very magical mixture of elixir. The reality of being at The Shrine and everyone celebrating her…we were shooting this new version of The Oscars. It was almost like the wind beneath our sails and giving us approval. I felt blessed doing this. It felt quite mystical.
AD: Now that you mention it, I am shocked that there isn’t a biopic about her or even a limited series devoted to her time in Hollywood. It’s strange that people don’t know who she is. I keep saying it because I find it very odd.
MK: Yeah. I’m curious about that myself. I had heard about different productions in development but nothing came to fruition. I don’t know what challenges they encountered. Now, in this climate, stories about her would be very obvious. I was looking at her life, and I tried to find the uplift. Her life is really quite tragic. How would you tell this story without it ending as a sad tale? What she stood for and how she persevered as an artist is her voice. The fact that she’s back in fashion, and she’s such an icon in the LGBT world. I think there will be another version of her.
AD: You are starting to do more work behind the camera, and you were selected as being part of the AFI Directing Workshop for Women. What is your main goal as a director right now?
MK: Thank you for asking about that. Playing Anna May kind of helped me see what the future is for people of color. With Anna May, she could’ve done more if she was in a more power position as a creator. For myself, having come from so many parts, I was in service of a main protagonist that was white. To be blunt. You are always in service of a white person’s story. Which is fine for the most part, but then as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen that there are more stories that exist. I’ve become more adept at being a better storyteller. Acting is one way of expressing myself, but now I am interested in really putting women and people of color—those belonging to that category of other. I want to place them as the main narrative and telling the story from their point of view. In the same way of being part of Hollywood, I would love to see her having her own story. I couldn’t imagine a white man telling that story solely. I think it needs to be someone who feels connected to the material, and I want to be the person to step into that role.
Hollywood is streaming now in Netflix.
