'My second role was as a dead prostitute on the floor'

Stoking Oscar buzz for coming-of-age film 'Didi', Joan Chen talks to Annabel Nugent about career regrets, her jump from China to Hollywood and being a doorknob in 'Twin Peaks'

- Annabel Nugent

It's been 33 years since Joan Chen was turned into a doorknob.

In 1991, having asked David Lynch to write her out of his surrealist soap opera Twin Peaks, the actor found her character, factory owner Josie Packard, doomed to a life in timber: her soul trapped within the handle of an oak wood nightstand. "I don't think anyone else has ever become a doorknob,” Chen laughs – not from inside a doorknob, mind you, but over Zoom.

That the scene rings so strange even for Lynch, a director famed for strangeness, is a testament to its singularity. Who else but Chen, now 63, can lay claim to the same bizarre fate? That same singularity has come to define the actor-director’s near 50-year career. It began in Shanghai, when she was plucked aged 14 from her school rifle range by Mao Zedong’s wife for her excellent marksmanship. Only five years later, at 19, she won China’s equivalent of the Best Actress Oscar before she moved stateside.

Of course, singularity is often a byproduct when you’re the first to do something – which, being a Chinese woman entering Hollywood in the 1980s, Chen often was. But in the US, she has flown mostly under the radar, popping her head above the parapet every so often to direct an MGM-backed romantic drama with Richard Gere and Winona Ryder (2000’s Autumn in New York) or star in a nine-time Oscar-winning film herself (Bernardo Bertolucci’s historical epic The Last Emperor) – all the while, working consistently back home in China and navigating the meagre, and often unsavoury, selection of parts available to her as an Asian actor in America.