The series that premieres Sunday, April 14 mixes black comedy with spy games in a Vietnam War story unlike any before it.
Hoa Xuande as the Captain in the new HBO limited-series “The Sympathizer,” based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. to the screen, but it wasn’t until a recent cruise down the Hollywood Freeway that he realized what a big deal the HBO adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel truly is.
Vy Le as Lana in the new HBO limited-series “The Sympathizer,” based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The new HBO limited-series “The Sympathizer,” based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, premieres on Sunday, April 14, 2024. Hoa Xuande as the Captain, left, with Toan Le as the General in the new HBO limited-series “The Sympathizer,” based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.
Robert Downey Jr. as the Congressman in new HBO limited-series “The Sympathizer,” based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. Part black comedy, part spy thriller, “The Sympathizer” was co-created by Canadian writer-producer Don McKellar and South Korean writer-director Park Chan-wook.Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel was a literary sensation on publication, earning acclaim for its subversion of genre tropes such as spy novels and war stories while telling a serious, entertaining and often funny story from the point of view of the Vietnamese side of the war.
“I mean, it literally involves hundreds of people working well over a year at a huge cost to make this, whereas I wrote the whole thing sitting in a little room by myself,” Nguyen says. “At that time, he doesn’t know that the book will turn to onscreen,” Chinh says. “So he just says, ‘Oh my God, we have the legendary actress Kieu Chinh in the audience.’ And he said, ‘Hopefully one day if the book turns into a series, you must be one of the characters.’”
The loneliness that The Major’s Mother feels in “The Sympathizer” reminded Chinh of her own feelings as a refugee living alone in a North Hollywood apartment when she arrived in the United States after the fall of Saigon, thanks to actress Tippi Hedren’s sponsorship. “I think that this war was unique,” McKellar says. “The first case, but I think still the only real case, where our conception of the war is through the movies. So this show, the first thing it’s doing is saying, ‘OK, Americans, OK, world, let’s look at this from the other side,’ and remind yourself that it was on Vietnamese soil. That the people who suffered most and the people who suffered longest were the Vietnamese people.
And when Park Chan-wook suggested Robert Downey Jr. play four different characters, the actor was all in, Susan Downey says.
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