Sandra Oh Gets Her Due!

After decades in supporting parts, Emmy nominee Sandra Oh plays the hero in Killing Eve.

- E. Alex Jung

When Sandra Oh was 21, her older sister spotted an ad in an alt-weekly looking for a young Asian actress. Oh, a student at the National Theatre School of Canada at the time, became fixated on the part—the starring role in The Diary of Evelyn Lau, a TV biopic on the Canadian novelist and poet’s teenage runaway years. She took a seven-hour bus ride from Montreal to Toronto for a tryout with the director, Sturla Gunnarsson. Before her audition, Oh slept in a bus station and went to a park to do breathing exercises. When she arrived, in baggy overalls and a Tshirt, she lay down on the floor and asked the casting director to hold her hand before she read a scene. “I said, ‘I’ll just squeeze it until I’m ready.’ Who knows how long it was?” she says, laughing. (Gunnarsson says it felt like ten minutes.) Then she stood up and won the part.

The memory still impresses her. “I really admire who that person was at that moment who just said, ‘I don’t know what the rules are. I’m going to lie down,’ ” Oh says. “That person took her time and was unapologetic about it.” Shortly thereafter, Oh landed her second big part, the lead in Double Happiness, Canadian director Mina Shum’s first feature. Both Evelyn Lau and Double Happiness were released in 1994; Oh was nominated for Best Lead Actress at the Gemini Awards (the Canadian Emmys) for the former and won in the same category at the Genie Awards (the Canadian Oscars) for the latter.