A background player grabs the spotlight

At the core of “Interior Chinatown” (shown here), which arrived recently on Hulu, is a waiter named Willis.
He’s someone we know, maybe someone we are. He goes through life being semi-noticed. A fan of cop shows, he feels he’s like a background player, the guy whose only function is to find a body or witness a crime.
Soon, that changes; this series – all 10 parts arrived at once — is filled with wondrous flights of fantasy. But before that, Willis symbolizes many people:
— Maybe undernoticed Asian-Amercans. “I grew up watching TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and I just never saw Asians,” Charles Yu, who wrote the series (and the book it’s based on), told the Television Critics Association.
— And maybe lot of other people, too, “It’s such a great metaphor for what it means to be Asian-American,” said Jimmy O. Yang, 37, who stars as Willis. “But at the same time, it’s a universal story of someone longing to be more …. which I guess I did.”
Like the fictional Willis, the real-life Yang expected to be in the background.
He emigrated from Hong Kong with his family at 13 and graduated from Beverly Hills High. For college and career, his parents had steep ambitions.
“The only thing that was legit to do was to be an engineer, which I tried,” he said. “My freshman year, I was an engineer. Way too hard for me; I smoked way too much weed. I ended up doing the easiest major that would appease my parents.”
He graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a major in economics (his dad’s field), but studied theater and did stand-up comedy.
Yang interned at a financial firm, but then retreated to California, with low expectations. “I didn’t think it was possible to be even a background actor.”
He went well beyond that. He started with commercials and eventually was a regular in two comedy series (“Silicon Valley” and “Space Force”). He did some small movies and one big one, “Crazy Rich Asians.”
That’s where he met his friend Ronny Chieng. In “Interior Chinatown,” Chieng (shown here, left) plays a sarcastic sort; Yang (right) plays the idealist.
He battles thugs and huddles with a gorgeous government agent (Chloe Bennett). Suddenly, the background actor is at the center of the action.