Sandra Oh has graced our screens as a number of memorable characters in the last two decades. She made us laugh and cry as Cristina Yang on Grey’s Anatomy. She embraced her dark side on the smash hit Killing Eve. And she stole the show with just a few iconic lines in The Princess Diaries.
But it’s her latest role in Netflix’s The Chair that Oh says she’s the most like in real life.
“I feel like Ji-Yoon is the closest character to myself that I’ve ever played,” Oh said. “There’s something in the way Amanda [Peet] wrote her. It was like Amanda was writing my own voice.”
Oh plays the lead in the upcoming Netflix limited series The Chair. She stars as Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim, the first female chair of the English department and one of just a couple staff members of color at a fictional New England university.
“We both wanted to explore how exhausting it can be to, first of all, be a woman in a supervising role, but also to be a person of color on top of that,” said showrunner and writer Amanda Peet. “You have to do your job, then you also have to navigate all of this subliminal shit that goes on because you represent a change in culture. When you are a woman of color you’re constantly being put to the test in covert ways (and blatantly) — white men don’t experience this added pressure when they are ascending the ranks of their professions.”
You can get a sneak peek at The Chair and hear more from Oh and Peet about how they crafted Ji-Yoon’s character and story in the clip below.
You can also read more from the pair in this Netflix blog.
I can personally say The Chair is definitely worth a watch. If you’ve ever watched Oh in anything it won’t surprise you to hear she’s brilliant in this, but overall the show has to be one of my favorite releases of the year. (You can read our full review here.)
The Chair premieres on Netflix August 20.
Source: Netflix
