Teresa Daley (紀培慧), 25, is at the W Taipei in strappy heels and a frock, looking very uptown. It’s a sharp contrast from her role as Vivian, a 17-year-old tomboy in HBO Asia’s new horror series Grace.
“I find that I have a gift. My ability to scream is excellent,” Daley says.
“There were always a lot of people on set, but I would be the only one in the scene. I had to pretend I was alone and truly frightened. ‘There’s no one here! Oh my god, what is that noise?’”
Photo Courtesy of HBO Asia
At the interview, she is slightly nervous but charming about it, grinning at her own jokes and talking about her favorite actors (Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis) with a kind of yearning.
She is the only Taiwanese actress cast in the HBO Asia original, a four-part series that premieres in Asia this Friday.
Grace is about a man whose indiscretions expose his family to the supernatural. The Joy Luck Club’s Russell Wong (王盛德) stars as Roy Chan, a loving but unfaithful husband, and Singaporean actress Constance Song (宋怡霏) is his wife, Angela.
Photo Courtesy of HBO Asia
Daley plays the youngest of the three Chan daughters, the first to detect something eerie and amiss.
The ensemble cast is all-Asian and their dialogue is partly in Chinese but primarily English. Off the set, the multinational cast and crew mostly used English, too, Daley says.
“I’m not a native speaker. I tried to keep up with everyone. When I couldn’t understand, I just nodded,” she says.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
“[In Taiwan] the only one I can speak English with is my dad … But dad has been here for a long time and has developed a style of talking that’s slower, you know. Very chill.”
Born in Los Angeles to an American father and Taiwanese mother, Daley moved to Taiwan when she was five years old and was enrolled in public school. As a sweet-faced girl with striking features, she was scouted on the street by an agency that still represents her today.
But it’s not merely the face that’s given her longevity. Since her television debut in 2006, she has won critical raves, including the 2011 Golden Bell Award (金鐘獎) for best supporting actress in Days We Stared At the Sun (他們在畢業的前一天爆炸).
Last year, she broke out among 70,000 contestants in a Beijing-based talent search program, becoming one of four finalists to land a role in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014).
“Each day you went to class. It was kind of like America’s Next Top Model. We had challenges every week and on the weekends, they cut people,” Daley says.
“I didn’t want to let my homeland lose face.”
Next, Daley wants to move abroad and train in the Meisner technique for acting.
Her models in the craft are Streep, who specializes in character range, and Day-Lewis, who does projects sparingly but “invests 200 percent, 300 percent of himself every time.”
“Two different ways to go about it,” Daley says. “I don’t know yet what I’ll become.”
Grace airs weekly on HBO starting this Friday at 10pm and culminating in a two-part finale on Halloween, Oct. 31. Each one-hour episode is in English and Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
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