Sandra Oh underplays where other actors push. The funny line and the cruel one arrive at the same volume and she lets us sort them out, which made Cristina Yang the best thing in Grey's Anatomy for years.
Fi1m perspective
Cristina Yang does not sit with the family. Other surgeons on Grey's Anatomy learn to; she treats compassion as a waste of theatre time and says so, in the same flat voice she uses for everything, so that a joke and a wound come out sounding identical. That flatness is what Sandra Oh does. Most actors lean into a line to tell you how to take it. Oh sets it down and walks off, and leaves you to work out whether you have been amused or insulted, which is usually both.
She had been doing it for a decade before anyone in Los Angeles noticed. There were leads in Canada, The Diary of Evelyn Lau (1994) and Double Happiness (1994), then a move south in 1996 for Arli$$ and a run of supporting parts in films. Sideways (2004) was the one that turned heads, and rightly. Alexander Payne gives her Stephanie, and she and Virginia Madsen are at their most persuasive once the men stop being charming. We wanted the film to stay with the two of them rather than trotting back to the men's troubles, and we suspect Payne half knew it.
Then Shonda Rhimes wrote her a part built entirely out of talk. Rhimes's interns speak fast, over each other and mostly about themselves, and Cristina cuts through the noise by refusing to raise her voice. We laughed out loud at her more than once, and it was the refusal that did it: she never asks for the laugh, so when it comes it feels earned rather than served. For its first few years the programme is as quick and sharp as American network television gets, and Oh is doing most of the cutting.
She stayed ten seasons, from 2005 to 2014, and left before the writing could wear her out, which is more judgement than the series itself has shown. Killing Eve (2018–2022) followed, with Oh as Eve Polastri in a series created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and since then there has been The Chair, voice work, producing and a return to the theatre she trained for. Those are for another day. What Stephanie and Cristina have in common is that neither is decoration: take either out and the scene around her stops making sense.
That is by design. Oh has said, "I decided that I'm only going to play characters that are essential to the plot, that conduct the narrative and therefore can't be cut out." Watching Stephanie and Cristina again, we would have cut most of the people around them first.
Biography
Sandra Oh is a Canadian and American actress. She trained at the National Theatre School of Canada and first gained recognition for lead roles in the Canadian films Double Happiness (1994) and The Diary of Evelyn Lau (1994), winning Genie Awards for both.
Oh is known for her television roles as Rita Wu in Arli$$ (1996–2002), Dr Cristina Yang in Grey's Anatomy (2005–2014) and Eve Polastri in Killing Eve (2018–2022). Her film credits include supporting parts in Bean (1997), The Princess Diaries (2001), Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) and Sideways (2004), as well as voice work in several animated features.
She has received one Primetime Emmy Award, two Golden Globe Awards and four Screen Actors Guild Awards. In 2021 she starred in and executive-produced the Netflix series The Chair.
