Asian A.V. Club newsletter #19
With the fun ensemble murder mystery 'Death and Other Details', actress Angela Zhou finds herself equally comfortable behind the scenes as a writer for the series.
Angela Zhou is enjoying this moment. Not only is the multifaceted talent co-starring in the whodunit-on-a-cruise-ship murder mystery Death and Other Details, but the actress got to flex her writing skills in a big way when she was invited to be part of the series writers room. For a creative that has spent much of her life wanting to be close to the words ‘action’, the past few years has been a dream come true.
We got the chance to spend some time with Angela recently to talk about her aspirational beginnings, what led to that first big paid gig, how a certain Emerald Fennell showed her a new path and what it was like to work with showrunners who were generous as leaders of the um…ship.
Q: We are always curious if there was any moment or movie that inspired you at a young age that made you want to pursue a career in the arts?
Angela Zhou: It's such a big thing to do and I was constantly getting little affirmations that I should be doing this. But then obviously, you're constantly questioning yourself with fear every step of the way. (laughs) So it really takes a lot.
Actually, there is one rather cinematic moment that I remember. I had done a lot of drama in high school and we also had this like Shakespeare Festival that you could compete in for the whole of New Zealand. And basically when you win regionals, you go to nationals and then they select the winners be a part of this national production with some of New Zealand's best directors. And then from there, they select some of you to go to train and perform at the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. I was lucky enough to be one of those people and I remember telling my mother, I had got this huge opportunity. And she was like, ‘What! What do you mean, you're gonna go to London and study acting? You're not gonna do this for a living, right?’ I was like, ‘oh, no, this is just to top off all of the acting I've done in high school. This will be the last big thing I do and then I'll get it out of my system and become a human rights lawyer.’ (laughs)
I remember after I went there for three weeks, and we were on our way back heading to Heathrow, I was looking out the window remembering all the fond memories, and I was thinking, ‘that was great.’ And then suddenly, I'm feeling my face and I realize that it’s wet. I’m totally crying. I thought, this might be what people mean when they say they have a passion, because I was crying thinking I was never going to do it again.
Q: But it wasn’t the end of the road for your passion.
Angela Zhou: I knew that [acting] was a passion of mine, and I could never stop doing it. But even then, I was still in denial. I thought, I'll always do community theater on the side of whatever job I'm doing. Then I got the Robertson Scholarship to go to Duke University and during breaks, I would try and fit in as many internships as possible. My idea was I was trying anything that sort of interests me. During the summer of my sophomore year, I worked at an innovation consultancy firm, but I took a two-week break and worked at Legendary Entertainment [global film and mass media company].
At Legendary, the cool thing is you get to rotate through different divisions. Because I worked at the consultancy internship, they allowed me to rotate through business affairs which was usually only for people with graduate degrees. I went through physical production and then through creative development, and I realized, this was where I wanted to be, but I still felt jealous of people who got to actually do the writing or be on set. I felt so close, but not close enough. (laughs) So I just kept interning.
After awhile, I realized there's no way to intern your way to a creative position in the industry, and you just have to show up to LA and start freelancing. And also, not listen to your mother when she's like, ‘when are you going to go to business school?’ (laughs)
Q: You booked a role on the AMC series Hell On Wheels very quickly after graduation, how did that happen?
Angela Zhou: I'm a New Zealander, right? And I didn't have a visa to stay in America. I only had a training extension on my student visa and I knew I only had a year to stay and find work. I knew I wanted to be on the creative side and so I met up with a Duke University mentor who took 10 minutes out of his day and gave me some advice on how to get into the industry. I basically said, I want to be as close to actually storytelling as possible. Even though I had won awards back in New Zealand for acting, did some writing and even directed music videos, I knew that it wasn’t enough and I asked them if there was a better way to go about it.
He immediately said, ‘Oh, you speak Chinese?’  And I'm like, ‘Yeah, I speak Cantonese and Mandarin.’ And he goes, ‘Actually, I think right now there's a movement in the business. And I'm seeing a wave of people looking for actors who can speak English and Cantonese, or Mandarin. It sounds crazy, but acting might be your easier way to stay in this country and get a visa.’
And so I doubled down on that. I would go online every single day, check actors access for any open casting calls. And, you know, God bless him because he was right, there was an open casting call for a series regular role on an AMC show Hell On Wheels. They were looking for an Asian female who can speak fluent Cantonese. And as you know, there are way less Cantonese speakers than Mandarin speakers. They also said ‘tomboy’ and I did the audition like a tomboy. Then I got a call back and had to sign an NDA [non-disclosure agreement] because it actually wasn’t a tomboy, but a young girl pretending to be a boy. Now, it just so happened that when I went to London, I played Rosalind in As You Like It and I had been trained by some of the best movement and voice coaches on how to gender bend. So, I ended up getting the job and went from non-union, to being on a proper set where they flew us to Victoria Island by jet. I remember the lead, Anson (Mount) turning to me saying, ‘I just want you to know, this is not a regular day on set’, and I’m like ‘I don’t care, this is a dream come true!’ (laughs)
Q: You worked on Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, what was it like to be around someone who wrote and directed her own work? Was it inspiring for you to see someone who could juggle so many things expertly?
Angela Zhou: I'm so inspired by Emerald and kind of obsessed with her too. Don't tell her that. (laughs) I was first introduced to her through the script. As you know, I interned a lot in creative development and when I read it, I was like, this is the best unproduced script I’ve ever read. I would love, love, love, to be a part of this in whatever role that could have me. Just seeing how she was able to balance all of that was really inspiring. It really made me realize that there was a shift in the waves in the business.
When was starting out, they kept saying, ‘Oh, you'd like to write and you'd like to act. And maybe you would even do some directing. But that's too many things. You're just gonna confuse people. You need to pick one and market yourself as that one first.’ And so that's what I kind of did. I doubled down only on the acting and I didn't tell anyone that I wrote. I even stopped writing. I just focused on learning the parts of being an actor these days that I was really bad at.
Q: Like what?
Angela Zhou: Like taking photos! I would find friends who are models and I'm like, please tell me how to take photos. (laughs) So when Emerald came along, I realized something has changed in this business. And suddenly people are okay with the fact that you like to do many different aspects of being able to tell stories. So I got back into my writing.
Q: I would LOVE for you to tell us about how something you wrote got you into the writer’s room for your current series Death and Other Details.
Angela Zhou: When I started finally writing again, I wrote Empress, which is a story that I thought was amazing about China's first and only female emperor, Wu Zetian. I began writing when COVID happened just to give me something to do, and once I finished the script as a feature, I was like, oh, actually, the feature is not the correct format for it. It should be a television show and I'm gonna now have to write a pilot. But rather than throw this feature script away, I submitted it to the Academy Awards Nicholl Fellowship screenwriting competition, and then thought nothing about it.
Then I booked a job as Teddy on Death and Other Details. And when we were shooting the pilot in September of 2021, the Nicholl competition released the fact that I was a semi-finalist. I posted it on my Instagram because I didn't want to tell anyone on set. I didn't want them to think I wasn't 100% focused. But God bless the showrunners [Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss], they were following me on Instagram. They read the logline and wanted to read it. But they didn't want to ask me for it. So like cheeky, cheeky detectives, they got their assistants to get it from me pretending they were the ones interested. So when we got picked up to series, [the showrunners] were like, ‘we read Empress! We don't know if you want to write but we'd love to have you in the writer’s room.’ (laughs)
Q: What was the writer’s room like for you?
Angela Zhou: We were coming out of COVID and originally it was all Zoom, then we were able to switch into an office and we had to do COVID testing once a week to get inside the room. And the room we had was fancy because we had Marc Webb’s [executive producer] massive office because he was shooting Snow White in London.
So it was basically like 10 of us, plus three assistants, and we would all be in this big conference room every day just staring at each other and the whiteboards and just throwing ideas around. But it was such a blessing to do that as my first time writing as a group. When you’re writing solo, sometimes you hit a point, and you're like I need to find this puzzle piece that fits just correctly because it needs to connect to this. Sometimes it can take at least three days of me banging my head against a wall or I'm taking long walks around like to try and figure out the solution. But the first time one of those problems came up in the room, I was like, oh, it's gonna take a while. And then literally, just as I finished thinking that, MJ [Myung Joh Wesner] was like, ‘what about this?’ And that was actually a solution. In these room, those issues that get resolved so much more quickly.
Q: But the fact is you’re also an actor on this show. Was it ever weird when they were talking about your character as a group and did you ever write for yourself in the end?
Angela Zhou: It was bizarre and awesome for everyone involved. Because when I first started in the room, I'm like, I just want to be treated like a proper writer and showed up with my glasses on the Zoom. (laughs). But you could tell it was the first time the other writers had ever written in a room with one of the actors on the show. At first, they were a little cautious because they thought maybe I could be easily offended or something. People don't realize that Kiwis are very easygoing, so it took a while for them to get to know me and understand that I didn’t care if you pitched stuff about her character.
Q: Did you pitch stuff about your character Teddy?
Angela Zhou: So the first couple of weeks, it was awkward because I refused to pitch anything related to my character. I didn’t want them to think that all I cared about was Teddy, so I didn’t say anything. Then I think nobody said anything about my character because they were worried I might not like the idea. So at one point Heidi walks into the room, looks at the outline for the episode and goes, ‘guys, Teddy is NOT in this episode!’ (laughs) Don’t worry, everybody started pitching immediately afterwards.
Q: For those who watched the series, episode 8 is a big one because you’re the co-writer of it!
Angela Zhou: It's amazing. It's so wonderful to have that experience because staff writers are not guaranteed an episode. Heidi and Mike are such gracious leaders that way. And the fact that they credit staff writers, that's something that wasn't mandated by the union. In fact, there are a lot of staff writers who don't get credited at the end credits or anything. So it’s a real testament to Heidi and Mike as wonderful people too.
We wrote the series as a group, but they decided whose names would go on which episode. And it's more like, they let you captain that episode a bit more. It’s not by any means you’re solo on it. But I will say on eight there is a sequence that I was very, very, very passionate about. And during that sequence, I was so glad that Mike and Heidi decided to have my name on it. I got to have the excuse to take off my actors hat off for a day and I got to sit on set as the writer on set. This particular sequence gives insight into Celia (Lisa Lu) and her background. It's a very rich and hopefully authentic background that some people might not know about or get to see Asian representation from modern Asian people.
Q: Speaking of Asian representation, THANK YOU for making sure the Asian characters actually SPOKE the language they’re supposed to be speaking on screen. Most shows have Asian characters who are almost there, but they’re always a tone or two or ten off.
Angela Zhou: I know EXACTLY how you're feeling! (laughs) One of the things that drew me to the script in the first place was how there's so many Asian characters in here. And it's not even an Asian show. They just happen to be Asian. So when I met Heidi and Mike, I was like, ‘Are you guys part Asian or something? Like, what's up with this?’ And they said it was always in the original scripts that Teddy's family is Cantonese. And that the Chun’s speak Mandarin. I was like, how do you guys even know that? I don't think I've seen that sort of differentiated in a script not made specifically for Asian people. Turns out Mike's best friend and original writing partner from college is Tze Chun [I’m a Virgo, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai – showrunner] and they named that family in honor of him.
And then after that, I basically told them if you ever need me to sit in for a callback for any actor that speaks Cantonese or Mandarin, please call me and I will show up to the Zooms. Because I do not want to be a part of something that makes me cringe where I know the people I'm working with don't actually speak the language. (laughs)
Q: You once said that you’d like to be able to work between the US and New Zealand, with home grown shows like the Asian centric Creamerie and Homegrown 3.0 being commissioned back home, is that looking more like a reality these days?
Angela Zhou: I think it'd be amazing if I could shoot something in New Zealand. I always tell my agents, ok…I tell everyone basically, please send me to New Zealand to work. I’ll just keep putting it out there. If I don't hear back, I guess I'll have to make it happen and I'll start a show or something.
Q: Now that you’ve had this wonderful work experience, where do you want to go from here? It feels like such a great motivator for you to try to put on many hats for future endeavours.
Angela Zhou: Right now, I'm just enjoying all that comes with Death and Other Details and celebrating this series with the cast and crew. Ideally, I would love to be able to write in a writer’s room for the first half and then shoot for the other half. That really is the right balance where the bookish nerdy part of me that loves to sit in the library and read and think up stories can exist with the other part that loves people and seeing them excel at their craft. I’d love to continue doing both every year.
Q: Is your mom finally on board with what you’re doing?
Angela Zhou: Oh, yes, for sure. Actually, she got on the bandwagon right off Hell on Wheels.  It's funny because what she says to people is, ‘you can discuss a lot of things from movies. When you watch with your family, it’s a great way to communicate and talk about deeper things.’ So she really believes that it’s an important job. (laughs)
Q: It IS an important job and I’m so happy you’re getting the chance to experience all of it! Thank you again!
Angela Zhou: Thank you!
Death and Other Details is streaming in full on Hulu and Disney+ internationally