Interview: Hong Chau on The Whale, The Menu, and the Art of What’s Left Unsaid

Hong Chau is a master of nonverbal acting. She can mesmerize you with a piercing gaze. Unnerve you with a curt smile. Jar you with a calculating tilt of a head. Humor you with brazen body movements. She can mine a script for the most subtle, unspoken interactions and bring them to life on screen with seeming ease, as she knows that what’s left unsaid is equally important as what is. And that’s what she displays so well in films as wide-ranging as Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale and Mark Mylod’s The Menu.

Entirely with her eyes, Chau’s character in The Whale jumps from intimidating the daylights out of the young missionary played by Ty Simpkins to empathizing with Brendan Fraser’s Charlie, a 600-pound man struggling to reconnect with his 17-year-old daughter. And in The Menu, her gait, posture, and precise facial expressions are a crucial ingredient to a slow-burning comedy of horrors that plays out throughout a dastardly fine-dining experience.

On the eve of The Whale’s limited theatrical release, I had the opportunity to speak with Chau about one crucial link between Aronofsky’s film and The Menu, as well as her process, from acting between the lines and balancing work and parenthood.

You’re in three of the most talked about films of the year. You could say that this is the year of Hong Chau.

Well, I planned it all perfectly. It worked out.

How does it feel to have your hard work pay off?

Every movie you do is sort of a leap of faith. I never know how they’re going to be received, by critics or by a general audience. And, for me, it’s just about the filmmaker and the material. So, I got really lucky in 2021, getting to work with Darren Aronofsky, then Kelly Reichardt, then Mark Mylod, and, finally, Wes Anderson. That was just a really wild year.

You, Brendan Fraser, and Sadie Sink carry The Whale on your shoulders. What were the conversations like with you, Darren, and Brendan about your two characters and their close relationship?

We did have a lot to carry on our shoulders, but that was what we were really looking forward to. It’s really unusual to have a film with so much dialogue. I mean, it’s wall-to-wall monologues and big, big scenes. So we were really up for the challenge. We were looking forward to it. It’s a challenge for both the creative side and also a challenge for the audience because it was adapted from a stage play and it retains a lot of the original script. I think there are some people who are going to be able to sit with it, and those audiences will be people who enjoy theater, who can handle the stamina of receiving that much dialogue. As for the conversations that we had beforehand, I personally don’t like to talk about [a character] with either a scene partner or the director. It’s just about putting the work up on its feet and feeling our way through and just making discoveries together because there’s only so much analyzing of the script that you can do by yourself and you can talk something to death, which is why it’s difficult for actors to do what we’re doing right now—doing press and trying to talk about it and analyze it in a way that we weren’t doing when we were making the film. It’s really difficult to sit down and talk about it because so much of it is just instinctual and about a connection that’s hard to verbalize.

Social media and our attachment to our phones is a common link in both The Whale and The Menu, namely how they exacerbate bullying and exploitation. The Menu offers a nice satirical snapshot of our generation, given that it targets people’s inability to last a meal without taking a photo of their food.

I love that both films acknowledge what a large part technology plays in our lives. But we found a way to not make it about that. There are no extreme closeups of phones or text messages popping up in windows on the screen. It’s a challenge for filmmakers to somehow not ignore that facet of culture and society right now, but to figure out how to make it cinematic and to implement it into a story in a way where it doesn’t weigh it down or detract. I think what an audience is supposed to get from something is so individual and wide-ranging, and that’s what’s so great about making a piece of art and putting it out into the world. You just never know what the reception is going to be, and everybody’s reaction is valid. It feels very human to take what you want out of it or take what you want at that particular moment in your life. You can always revisit something and feel differently about it, and that’s what I love about film.

Your characters in both The Whale and The Menu have a quiet intensity to them. You were able to emote more with The Whale, but with The Menu, you had to rely a lot on nonverbal communication. I won’t discuss your breaking point with Anya Taylor-Joy’s character because that’s a delicious spoiler. Is it difficult finding a way to move the audience when you’re tasked with being so reserved or clinical like your character in The Menu, or even the one you played in The Watchmen?

Yeah, it’s funny that you brought up both of those. I found them really challenging when they were presented to me for that very reason. There wasn’t a clear direction to go with either of those characters. And for Elsa in The Menu, there wasn’t any moment in the script where you found out, “Oh, this is her reason for being. This is how she joined Chef Slowik, and this is her whole entire backstory and why she’s here, and here’s what she’s going to do with that.” In the script, she had a very simple description: “A severe Scandinavian woman.” And that was all I had to go on. So the discussions that I had with Mark Mylod, our director, was about lifting her from the page a little bit and giving her some more definition without necessarily adding more dialogue because you can accomplish so much without dialogue, and it’s just a matter of filling in that intention for yourself. And maybe it’s not all there out in the open, but the audience is going to pick up on it in some way, and it’s through behavior and through how you look and just unspoken interactions between your character and another character.

So it was just really about thinking about those things and being really specific about it and having a reason why. Both the writers, Will Tracy and Seth Reiss, and Mark thought that Elsa should be unremarkable because they didn’t want to give away anything too early in the movie. And I was of the opinion, “Well, the trailer usually does a pretty good job of spoiling things for people, so let’s just not think about that—about trying to save anything. Let’s just try to make a really interesting character here,” because it’s one thing to serve as a plot or a strategy, but, for me, it’s more important to fight for the character and create somebody whole and interesting.

You mentioned that the crux of The Whale is the father-daughter connection and the love between them in a previous interview. And you’re a recent first-time parent yourself. Congratulations.

Thank you!

How did that influence your decision come on board the film? And what was it like filming with a new kid on set?

It was so many emotions. When I first got the role, my friends and family were so excited for me, like, “Oh, my God, you’re going to go work with Darren Aronofsky?” And I said, “Yes, but I feel like I’m going to barf. Like, I feel so many emotions.” I wanted to just stay at home and be with my daughter. I wasn’t really wanting anything else because I was pretty satisfied with where I was career wise even before the pandemic. And it was after I had done Homecoming and Watchmen, I thought, “Okay, I’ve saved up some money. I can take some time off and go do something for myself that isn’t just about work and maintaining my acting career.” So, I honestly felt so much hesitancy in being emotionally invested in The Whale, even though I knew it was a great script and that Darren was directing it. I didn’t know if I could really put in the work that was required for the role because it’s a big part; it’s a supporting part, but it’s got a lot of layers, and there’s a lot of work to do there, and I just didn’t know if I could do it.

And I was so happy that Darren and the rest of the team were so receptive to me as a new mother. The first time I spoke to Darren was over FaceTime, and I was holding my daughter and feeding her, and he was totally unfazed, very cool, and he was like, “Do what you gotta do. We’ll just keep talking.” And that was indicative of how it was going to be the rest of the shoot. The producers had a separate room, if I wanted to bring the baby and have the baby there, that was separate from my dressing room. And our first AD was this very sweet Italian man, Duccio Fabbri, and he pulled me aside on the first day and said, “I think you’re so courageous for coming here and working as a new mother. Anything you need, if you need time to go pump or anything, you just let me know.” That was so unexpected. Not that I thought that I needed to go away or disappear or hide because I was a mother, but I just didn’t know if the workplace would see me as an inconvenience now that I had other priorities in my life. So it was really nice that they were the way they were and so supportive of me outside of what I was doing for the movie.

In an interview for the Baltimore Sun, you said, “If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories,” and that your parents’ story always seemed like a movie to you. That resonated with me because my family left their homeland by boat escaping the Armenian genocide. Have you ever considered writing and directing a story about your parents and their experience?

I think Downsizing was me telling my parents’ story. It wasn’t beat for beat what happened to them, but my character in the film had a very dramatic escape from Vietnam and found herself in the United States working and trying to get by and just trying to start a new life for herself. Learned two new languages, English and Spanish. And that was very similar to my parents’ story. And I totally acknowledge that some people didn’t like that story or that movie. And it still is perplexing to me because it just feels so loving and sympathetic and accurate to the refugee story that I didn’t understand all of the—I don’t know what the right word for it is—static around it or around my character and my character’s accent. And, to me, it just showed that people in the U.S. still have a very real problem with accents and people with accents, and, in particular, accents that belong to a group of people who come from lower economic backgrounds.

It was beautifully told. You worked with André 3000 in Showing Up. Were you a fan of his music before acting with him?

Yeah! Of course. I was so excited to find out that he was joining us. And he’s such a cool person. I just like being around him. He just has a good energy. We don’t even need to talk. I just like standing next to him and we just vibe. It’s really cool. He’s a really, really cool guy.

That makes me so happy to hear. So you have projects with Wes Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Rian Johnson coming out next year. It’s tough to think of a better lineup of directors. Which project has you most excited? And is Wes Anderson as impeccably dressed on set as he is in public?

Oh, yes, he is. He’s a very, very stylish man. Honestly, they’re all so different. They’re hard projects to get made. So I’m really excited and I hope they all do well. Truly.