How Sandra Oh Brought Her Full Self Into Her Character In 'The Chair’

In her new Netflix series, the actor adds to her formidable career of dynamic characters, from Dr. Cristina Yang on “Grey’s Anatomy” to Eve Polastri on “...

For Sandra Oh, there’s a throughline connecting her latest role in the Netflix series “The Chair” to a role from all the way back at the beginning of her career, like bookends.  Long before she became the legend and icon behind some of the most richly realized and multidimensional women on television — from Dr. Cristina Yang on “Grey’s Anatomy” to Eve Polastri on “Killing Eve” — and long before her name was on T-shirts, she starred in a small Canadian movie called “Double Happiness.” Written and directed by Chinese Canadian filmmaker Mina Shum, who would go on to frequently collaborate with Oh, the 1994 movie is a slice-of-life portrait of Jade Li (Oh), an aspiring actor in her early 20s.  The movie still feels revelatory all these years later because it’s about a young Asian woman living her life. We see her hanging out with her best friend, figuring out dating, navigating her family’s expectations and trying to find her way in the world. It’s one of those movies I wish I had known about much earlier in my life, instead of only having discovered it earlier this year, as I told Oh when she mentioned the movie during our interview.