Sandra Oh says shooting The Chair during a pandemic was both ‘joyous’ and ‘really hard’

Shooting the total six-part miniseries The Chair during a global pandemic was a challenge, nevertheless it absolutely also made for an exhilarating skills, said the demonstrate’s star, Sandra Oh.

In The Chair, which streams on Netflix Friday, Ottawa-born Oh stars as Ji-Yoon Kim, the newly appointed chair of a beleaguered English department at a prestigious liberal arts faculty. 

With tight time and pandemic-related health constraints in place, the crew and acting ensemble — featuring all-stars Holland Taylor, Jay Duplass and Bob Balaban — pushed themselves to an “instinctive place,” which forced them to make choices swiftly, Oh said.

“You create no longer have time to contemplate or wallow or to doubt your self,” Oh suggested CBC News in an interview this week. “And so each person was ready to coast. And it was moderately joyous to make [the show] that way.”

Silent, the circumstances typically proved challenging for the cast.

“The stress was high,” she said. “It was really hard to shoot the demonstrate.”

WATCH | Sandra Oh talks about her starring characteristic in Netflix’s The Chair:

Killing Eve star Sandra Oh tells CBC News about her fresh Netflix miniseries The Chair, whereby she plays an English department chair at a prestigious college rocked by scandal. 1: 41

A satire of faculty campus politics

Caught up in a whirlwind of family tensions, workplace chaos and a candy, fledgling romance, Ji-Yoon is beneath strain as the primary woman of colour to hasten the imploding department, and she’s going to seemingly be its decision scapegoat after her colleague and romantic passion Invoice is embroiled by controversy.

“You glance her attempting to circulate via it, optimistically by conserving her relationship robust, because ultimately, it’s a dramedy about character and workplace and family,” Oh said.

The miniseries is both a satire of faculty campus politics and a severe explore at the archaic culture of universities. Ji-Yoon’s English department colleagues are predominantly white, male and deeply out of contact with their innovative-minded scholar physique. 

“Here is a woman, a single mom, a woman of colour, who’s now ascended to the place of chair of her department in a patriarchal, passe institution. And she wants to make change,” the actor said.

“She has a very transgressive situation that her dear buddy [is in], and now she’s acquired to repair it someway, or she believes that she has to repair it.”

Impressed by intergenerational differences 

Author and govt producer Amanda Peet created the demonstrate alongside screenwriter Annie Wyman. Most attention-grabbing identified for her work as an actor, Peet suggested the Unusual York Occasions that an argument with her 14-year-passe daughter impressed the demonstrate’s intergenerational issues.

After Peet criticized a TikTok star’s clothing choices, and the teen puzzled Peet’s feminist credentials, she was intrigued by the idea of a character “who belief of herself as a trailblazer and a feminist and now’s belief of as part of the design.”

Lead character’s Korean name ‘really appealed to me’: Oh

In an interview with the Associated Press, Oh said the sequence was an thrilling alternative to take on lighter fare while on a break from BBC’s seek hit Killing Eve.

However what really caught her recognize, the Canadian-South Korean actor said, was the lead character’s name. 

“I can — very slowly over my career — explain the change that has happened,” she said. “To be actually able to position a Korean name and have all the characters say your name. It really appealed to me.”