Twenty years after he was a young, struggling actor in Toronto, Thomas Lo (盧瑞麟) is now the one giving young Asian actors their big breaks. He just had to go to Hong Kong to do it.
The Chinese Canadian has been the creative director of one of the territory’s biggest TV broadcasting companies for only a few years, but is already making original English-language content to reach viewers around the world.
“It was a bit of a full-circle moment for me,” Lo said. “You see more Asians, but you’re still seeing the same Asians on screen, right? We’re looking for more opportunities on a grander scale and it’s not just in front of the camera. It’s behind the camera as well.”
Photo: Tsz925 via AP
It is vastly different to work as an Asian actor in North American hubs — Los Angeles, New York, Toronto — than in those in Asia — such as Taipei or Hong Kong. Actors in Asia do not as often have to deal with auditioning for stereotypical characters, being the only Asian on a set or getting tokenized.
Historically, many Asian-American and Canadian actors have relocated from the West to countries in Asia to find better opportunities in entertainment.
However, a few film and TV producers on both sides of the Pacific are looking to shake up those dynamics by crisscrossing their show biz ecosystems. The hope is a win-win with fledgling talent in the Asian diaspora gaining global exposure — and Asia-based productions getting wider audiences.
For example, the Hulu series Shogun, which won 18 Emmys, demonstrated a successful collaboration between Japanese and Western cast and crew — which included Japanese Americans.
At the helm of Hong Kong’s Television Broadcasts Ltd (TVB), Lo led its first collaboration with a US company — on an original TV drama with scenes in English and Cantonese. Two crews on two different continents filmed Cross My Mind, a series about a Chinese American aspiring music producer in Los Angeles (Nathan Ing) who becomes telepathically connected to a Hong Kong advertising executive (Cantopop singer Jocelyn Chan, 陳明?).
Chan, 30, was born in Hong Kong, but spent ages 3 to 11 in Vancouver. She returned to Hong Kong for her music career partly because of concern about succeeding in North America.
“A lot of people probably had similar sentiments to me where it’s more possible if we came back to this home,” Chan said of finding success in the entertainment industry in Asia. “We all feel like we have two homes.”
Her role in Cross My Mind is powerful and assertive, far from Western stereotypes of Asian women as meek.
The partnership between Los Angeles-based Wong Fu Productions and TVB started with one side messaging the other on Instagram.
“It’d be cool if we can kind of tap into their audience of what they built because that’s who we’re trying to speak with,” Lo said, about reaching Asian-American viewers.
Wong Fu, which started in 2003, is a YouTube channel of Asian American-centered skits and other content. Simu Liu (劉思慕) was among its then-emerging actors.
“Now we have actors that want to work with us for free and are just like: ‘Put us in whatever,’ knowing that it’s a way to connect with Asian Americans first,” Wong Fu cofounder and creative director Wesley Chan (陳德偉) said. “Then that can also be a way to propel them.”
Wesley Chan, no relation to Jocelyn Chan, was intrigued by the challenge of shepherding a story that incorporates Asian and Asian-American protagonists. He and his team wrote six episodes of Cross My Mind in six months to film in 2022.
“We knew that they wanted to make a story that could kind of show the cultural differences between an American and someone in Hong Kong,” he said. “I thought that was really cool because to even know that there is a difference — or to share that there’s a difference — I think is a nuance that is not seen very often.”
Meshing work styles was no small feat. Wesley Chan noticed crews in Los Angeles and Hong Kong — where there are no unions — worked differently. It in some ways paralleled the bicultural nature of the show itself.
The show premiered in April 2023 on myTV Super, TVB’s streaming platform, which has 9 million subscribers. It debuted the following December in the US on two new streaming platforms that have since merged into GoldenTV, which focuses on English language content for Asian-American viewers.
“There’s two different audiences on both sides of the world, but it’s still content that I think has eyeballs,” GoldenTV founder Takashi Cheng said. “The fact that they need English-language programming tells you that American or English content is not dead. It’s in fact very much attractive in foreign countries.”
GoldenTV has gained thousands of subscribers since launching nearly two years ago, Cheng said.
The platform plans to grow with unscripted shows. In September, it premiered entertainment news show The Takeaway, hosted by influencer Michelle Park. Actor Daniel Wu (吳彥祖, American Born Chinese) is developing a docuseries on his love of racing.
Wu, 50, rose to fame after moving to Hong Kong.
Someone like Wu — who was born in the San Francisco Bay Area, became a Hong Kong cinema star and then pivoted to Hollywood — is a “rarity,” Lo said.
Before digital audiences, it was difficult to alternate between Asian and American screens, he said.
“I think we were a breath of fresh air for those actors and talents and artists, when we said that we’re going to be producing English content,” Lo said. “There is an audience that’s untapped here.”
Wesley Chan said Wong Fu is not ruling out being “a conduit” for more crossover collaborations.
Jocelyn Chan is still maintaining her singing career with hit singles and a solo Hong Kong concert this year, but she said that the success of Cross My Mind, has given her the courage to think about acting beyond Hong Kong.
She is now looking for an agent in Canada.
“It kind of pushed me to not wait,” said Chan, who is also a sound healer and practitioner.
She also said there is more space for talent who grew up bicultural.
“It’s almost like an even more niche representation within the wider Asian representation,” she added.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS