Power Lunch

It’s Time to Fall in Love With Jimmy O. Yang

After stealing scenes from Silicon Valley to Space Force, Netflix’s newest rom-com lead gets vulnerable about craft, humor, and feeling at home in Hollywood. 
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Illustration by Jorge Arévalo. 

Zooming with Jimmy O. Yang feels not unlike catching up with any other long-distance—or any-distance—friend lately. We chat first from his yard, where the light in Los Feliz is still predictably golden. Within minutes, Yang is carrying the laptop over to his garden, where he tilts the screen down at neat clusters of marigolds. “They’re $5 Home Depot marigolds, and they’re crushing it,” he says. Then he brings his vegetable garden into view, where he’s growing herbs, bell peppers, and habanero. Yang introduces “a great tomato plant” with a new laptop angle—adding, with immense pride for a guy casually sporting a 1969 Rolex Pepsi—that he grew it from seed. The gastronomic verdict? “I gotta say, better than most tomatoes I’ve had in L.A.”

Most of Yang’s home remains a work in progress: He bought the house in February 2020, which was a fine time to renovate until the rest of the world joined in. “Now everybody’s remodeling,” Yang sighs. “You know you’re an adult once you’re talking about fucking lumber prices.” Still, after growing up in apartments (first in Hong Kong, then in Los Angeles after his family moved when Yang was 13), it’s the 34-year-old’s first house, and Yang is devoted. In between releasing his stand-up special Good Deal on Amazon, shooting the second season of Space Force, and starring in Netflix’s new holiday rom-com Love Hard, he’s already redone the kitchen, primered the guest bath, and generally leveled up his gardening and cooking (“On YouTube, you can learn anything”).

I’d be ignoring low-hanging yard fruit if I didn’t read Yang’s nesting phase metaphorically, as a figurative settling-in to match the success he’s found on shows like Silicon Valley and Space Force, and in films like Crazy Rich Asians and Patriots Day—a 2016 thriller about the Boston Marathon bombing that casts Yang in an uncharacteristically serious role, as real-life American hero Dun “Danny” Meng.

This holiday season, we’ll finally see him take a leading role in Love Hard, a Netflix Christmas movie. The movie serves up the usual city-girl-small-town trope, as well as a lot of repackaged nostalgia. But it’s also a rather excellent showcase for Yang as Josh Lin, a bumbling Lake Placid townie with terrible Tinder luck until he matches with Natalie, a romance columnist from L.A. played by Nina Dobrev.

There’s a twist, though. Josh has been using the photos of Tag, a former classmate played by Darren Barnet, on his dating profile. When Natalie finds out what Josh really looks like, it’s framed as a record-scratch moment—as though it’s inherently ridiculous to think someone like Natalie could date someone like Josh. It’s not helped by a weird exchange later in the film, where Natalie brings up her last ex—who was born in Beijing—then adds, unprompted, “And he was amazing in bed!”

Yang acknowledges the implicit Asian question here: that a film about a seemingly dorky Chinese American guy who resorts to catfishing recalls pop culture’s racist, long-standing tendency to emasculate Asian men. “Nobody feels that more than me, being the guy who looks like that and is Asian,” Yang tells me. He knows how the film’s trailer might look—while fully understanding how Hollywood tropes and racial discrimination on dating apps work too.

But Yang also pushes me to consider Josh’s character more deeply, beyond just a potential win-lose in the Representation Olympics. And as he does, I find myself reexamining my own expectations. Does an interracial Netflix rom-com have to bring an accompanying thesis on identity to the table? Is it fair to ask Yang to be the Chosen Asian Spokesman in this context? Isn’t it enough to enjoy Yang’s sensitive portrayal of a romantic everyman, to take it at face value?

Because while the politics of representation are amorphous, the realities of opportunity aren’t. Yang knew that taking on the role of Josh—a character who he says wasn’t written with any particular race in mind—would lead to the employment of at least three other Asian actors, who’d be tapped to play members of Josh’s family. (Yang’s Crazy Rich Asians costar Harry Shum Jr. wound up playing Josh’s brother.) Moreover, when Tag had to be recast (Charles Melton dropped out for scheduling reasons), Yang himself made it clear to the producers that the third lead should remain Asian American; the role went to Darren Barnet. 

“Ultimately, it was one of those things where I took the part thinking, I think this is a positive step for representation, to see an unlikely hero who could have been any ethnicity,” he says. “Look: At the end of the day, if you don’t think I’m hot, you might think Darren’s hot. You might think my dad is hot. You might think Harry is hot. We give you a whole spectrum of cute Asian guys.”

In our second conversation, Yang carries his phone out to the garden again, where he snips off a few basil leaves and Thai chilis, tucking them inside his hoodie pocket to bring inside. In the kitchen, he grinds up a single serving of homemade pesto against a backdrop of teal-ish cabinetry. It turns out it’s the same paint color covering the Lin house’s walls in Love Hard: Benjamin Moore’s Narragansett Green. Yang had asked the set designer for the exact shade, and used it to bring a little of the movie into his actual home.

The logistics of our Zoom lunch date bring up the nature of COVID and connection—how he and Nina Dobrev had to work on their chemistry via FaceTime while quarantining before the shoot, how he and Harry Shum Jr. ordered dim sum for lunch daily, how on-set safety measures intensified that summer-camp sense of closeness with the cast. “Usually I would say every movie or TV show I do, I make one really close friend,” Yang notes—though Crazy Rich Asians was another outlier. “Everybody stayed closer friends. That’s when I knew that movie was pretty special.” In fact, Shum and Awkwafina recently came to his house for a Squid Games–inspired Halloween tournament. (“I think Nora might have won.”)

There’s no exact recipe he’s following: It’s just some mortar-and-pestle action before Yang pops a bag of World Market casarecce into a roiling pot, though he has been prone to experiment with his YouTube learnings. (“Who says you can’t do pesto chow mein?”) I ask how the lessons he learned doing stand-up translate into his current work, and he lights up at the question. “Vulnerability is huge,” he says immediately. “All good comedy is based on truth, you know? Even if you say your joke doesn’t work and you admit it in the moment, ‘Well, that one ain’t shit,’ everyone always laughs. I think it's the same with acting.”

It reminds him of a conversation he had with his girlfriend—the relationship is fairly new; she works in tech—about how you know Tom Hanks is a great actor because he’s always by himself onscreen. “He’s just so in the moment and truthful, and you get lost in it.” Yang says. “The magic really happens when you forget you’re onstage. You’re not thinking about the next joke. You’re making a connection with the audience and just rolling. To get into that zone, it takes a little practice. Stand-up helps with that.”

But everything’s a little circular, as Yang has learned from joining the writers room on the second season of Space Force. “Being a better writer makes you a better stand-up. Being a better actor makes you a better writer,” he decides as he drains the pasta and mixes in the pesto. “All of these things are just a specific study of human nature.”

Now for the all-important first bite. Last time he made pesto, Yang tells me, he toasted the garlic, which meant it didn’t taste as sharp. Today, he went with raw garlic; the pure contentment on Yang’s face says it all. (“That Home Depot basil, man, it’s the real deal.”) A little improv can bring you a long way—to great pasta, new roles, more ambitious responsibilities, even running your own production company with friends.

“I think that’s why TV and movies scare me a little sometimes,” Yang says, grinning over his casarecce. “I’m not used to it. Being from a stand-up background, I’m like, Oh shit, if I do a bad job, people are gonna see this forever. That part is a little scary, and that’s why I think I love cooking so much. It stays in the moment. If it’s not delicious today, you can make it tomorrow.” He takes another bite. “But it is delicious today.”

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