Actress Shirley Chen Seeks Complicated Truths in Her Roles

By Amber X. Chen
July 22, 2024
Profiles

When I met actress Shirley Chen in Los Angeles, she had just received news that she booked the lead role in Amy Wang’s upcoming satire film Slanted, which centers around the story of an insecure Chinese American teenager who undergoes a life-changing transracial surgery to become white. Chen, who lives in New York, was only in LA for a second, preparing to start filming the feature in Georgia. “The plotline is very wild, especially at first glance,” Chen said. “I think it’s a really risky movie that hasn’t been done before. We’ve seen a lot of racial and political satires for other groups, but we haven’t really seen it for Asian Americans. We don’t have anything that’s sort of uncomfortable and forces you to think in some way.”

For Chen, Slanted presents not just an opportunity to have fun and experiment within a new genre—it’s also a movie where she feels she can locate a “core kernel” of truth in who she is. As someone who pursued Asian American Studies at Harvard, went to an arts high school in Los Angeles, and grew up in Washington State, Chen described her own struggle with identity in predominantly white environments. ”There is this part of me that’s always been like, what if I was different?,” she admitted. “There is that quiet version of myself that really hates that it exists. But it’s there, and it’s real, and being able to play a character where that’s 100% truthful, even within a satire setting, is really special.”

As an actress, Chen is all about finding these kernels of truth in the roles she plays, seeking out stories that are less prescriptive of what the Asian American experience is and more reflective of the messy complications of individual lives.

“It definitely feels like a dream,” she said. “This month, I’m premiering a movie that did really well at Sundance, and… I’m filming another one!” The movie that “did really well at Sundance” is Dìdi—rising director Sean Wang’s coming-of-age feature film debut about a Taiwanese American kid growing up in the suburbs of Fremont, California in the 2000s.

In Dìdi, Chen plays Vivian, the insecure, rage-filled, eczema-ridden older sister to Izaac Wang’s Chris complete with an obsession with the band Paramore and early-2000s side-swept emo hair. In the film, Chen and Wang star opposite Joan Chen, who plays their mother. “It’s about the summer before going off to college—what does that mean for me and my relationship with my little brother?,” she explained. “Ultimately, it’s about really loving someone and not knowing how to tell them.”

In reality, Chen actually has an extremely close relationship with her brother. Born in China before their parents immigrated to the United States, Chen’s brother is eight years older than her. She credits seeing him perform in plays and musicals at school as the reason she got into acting in the first place.

Soon after, she began acting classes and auditioning for commercials. In middle school, her mom took a huge leap of faith and moved with her to Los Angeles. Chen enrolled in the LA County High School of the Arts, where she got the opportunity to audition for a short film, Krista, that later got turned into the coming-of-age drama Beast Beast.

In college, Chen knew she wanted to take a step back from the conservatory-style theater training she had received in high school, and began to explore Asian American history. For her thesis, she put together a one-woman show Chinatown, My Chinatown on the history of San Francisco Chinatown’s beauty pageants. Having this background is what informs Chen’s desire to explore more stories that tap into forgotten sides of Asian American history, whether that be in the San Gabriel Valley, in Japanese rugby teams, or in Flushing, NY. Within this history, Chen wants to tell stories of aimless Asian Americans — stories, like Dìdi, about kids that are just figuring themselves out.

Still from Beast Beast (2020), directed by Danny Madden.

“Growing up, I think I had a really clear idea of who I was and what I wanted my career to look like: I wanted to tell badass stories about women in Asian American history and really be a spokesperson for my community,” she said. “And then I graduated, and I was like, who am I? I’ve entered that phase of life where I’m just figuring out who I am.”

Another driving force for Chen is a desire to make her family proud. “They have been there for me through it all, every high and low,” she said. “In that way, I feel really open with them. I hope that watching movies with my parents helps them understand me more and helps them understand what it’s like to be American.” Her parents haven’t seen Dìdi yet, and she is curious how they’re going to receive it: whether they’ll resonate with themes that are so similar to their own immigration story.

“There’s a line that Joan’s character says to Izaac: ‘You are my dream,’” said Chen. “My mom has said those exact words to me. I’ve always thought my parents’ dream was for me to be way more successful than them or make more money, but at the end of the day, they are just happy to see that I exist. I always have to remember that.”

—Amber X. Chen is a writer from Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, the LA Times, The Nation, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among other publications.

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