Stephanie Hsu plays two people in one face, the public one and the one underneath, and lets us watch for the moment the wrong one slips out. Films that give her both are lucky; films that give her a scene are wasting her.
Fi1m perspective
In Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) Stephanie Hsu arrives in a sequinned Elvis suit as Jobu Tupaki, a being who has seen every universe and found them all dull, and somewhere behind the costume is Joy Wang, a sullen daughter who cannot get her mother to listen. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert ask her to be both, often in the same shot, and she is best when you can see one inside the other. The film throws a great deal at the screen, and we kept finding our eye going back to her, waiting for the daughter to surface under the glitter; when she did, briefly, it got at us more than any of the fighting. Whatever Hsu is playing, there is a second person in there, and the pleasure is in watching the seams.
She came to it from the stage. After training at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts she worked in experimental theatre and sketch comedy in New York, then originated parts in the Broadway musicals Be More Chill and SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical. Television followed, with recurring parts in The Path and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, where she played Mei Lin. Then Kwan and Scheinert cast her as Joy and Jobu, and the habit theatre had drilled into her, broad on the outside and something else underneath, had a film built for it. Since then she has been a supporting player in Joy Ride (2023), The Fall Guy (2024) and, in voice only, The Wild Robot (2024).
Joy Ride uses her properly. As Kat she runs a public face and a private one at once, and Adele Lim's film gets most of its Hsu laughs from the moments the wrong face slips out. We laughed, and then felt slightly sorry for Kat, which is the right order. Ashley Park and Sherry Cola carry the friendship at the film's centre and Sabrina Wu takes the biggest laughs, but Hsu's is the part that needed an actor rather than a comic, and she is the actor. The film loses its nerve late on; she does not.
The other two show what happens when nobody asks for the second face. The Fall Guy gives her Alma Milan, one scene, and then sets her aside while it attends to a mystery plot that did not deserve the attention. In The Wild Robot she voices Vontra, the trouble that arrives in the last third, by which point the film has stopped looking at faces and started moving fast, an odd use of an actor whose face is the point. Both are decent films and neither is her fault. But a single note is not what she is for.
She has said of Joy and Jobu, "Both characters share the same core spirit of nihilism. For Joy, if nothing matters, that sends her to a place of hopelessness. For Jobu, if nothing matters, then anything is possible." That is a precise account of what she does. The stage has had her again, in The Rocky Horror Show; the cinema would do well to find her a whole person before the theatre keeps her.
Biography
Stephanie Ann Hsu is an American actress. She was born on 25 November 1990 in Torrance, California. She trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and began her career in experimental theatre before appearing on Broadway, where she originated the roles of Christine Canigula in Be More Chill (2015–2019) and Karen the Computer in SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical (2016–2017).
Hsu gained critical acclaim for her dual performance as Joy Wang and Jobu Tupaki in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her other film credits include Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Joy Ride (2023) as Kat, The Fall Guy (2024) as Alma Milan and The Wild Robot (2024) as the voice of Vontra. On television she has appeared in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2019–2023) as Mei.
