Jimmy O. Yang (performing a bit)
speaker
225 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Jimmy O. Yang (performing a bit)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And he is naturally very good and a very charismatic guy. So he's doing it. If you guys need an older Asian dad in your movies, call Richard O. Yang.
Wow, man, you did your research. I forgot about that. I did. We did have the same agent back then. And they were looking for like a Chinese scientist that they imagined to be older. I was quite young and I looked quite young also at the time. So I think my dad got the audition first. And it was a lot of pages. It was a pretty juicy guest star role. And I think he or my agent said, I don't know.
I just don't know if he's ready for this. Why don't you try it? And then I tried it and I went in and I booked the job. But I was very afraid to call him, be like, hey, dad, sorry. You know, I finally told him he was like, oh, yeah, yeah. No, no. You were great at that. It was good. That was your job. So I was like, oh, that's nice.
Yeah, that's how he got his SAG card. I think with everything I do, especially when it comes to language, Cantonese, Mandarin, I want it to be very authentic. But on Patriot's Day, they hired someone to play my dad. It was just a simple FaceTime call. And this might sound weird to you guys, but I hope it makes sense. The dad spoke Mandarin with a Cantonese accent.
And that, to me, is very unrealistic. So I told Peter Berg, the director, I was like, hey, I'm sorry to bring this up, but this is kind of weird. Nobody will notice except Chinese speakers, but it's weird to me. And the story in Patriot's Day was based on real people. So he's like, no, no, we got to get this right. We're going to make it authentic. Why don't you sit in a couple auditions with me?
I'm like, okay, I can do that. Or you can just hire my dad. He's great. He's acting in a few commercials and things like that. And he speaks perfect Mandarin. And he's like, done. Done deal. Boom. And then the next day, my dad flew to Boston. And he played my dad in Patriot's Day. And that's how he got a SAG card.
We do, and I keep telling him to take acting classes because naturally he's got great instincts and he's really charismatic. But he's like, I'm too old to learn, whatever. But I think there's a fear of him. He's afraid of failure. So he doesn't want to go take a bunch of acting classes and then fail. That means he's not good. So he just likes stuff that comes easy to him. And he loves to accolade.
In a way, I think he is... much more attention seeking than me and he loves taking selfies and being on you know social media i'm i had to make him put his instagram on private it was getting too wild um but but uh he loves all that stuff and in a way at first i found it kind of like i'm like man like he's like kind of overstepping into my world that i created for myself you know
Like what is this nepo daddy business? I don't like it. But now I'm like, if this is what's gonna make him happy truly, if a little bit of fame and recognition makes him really happy and he gets to be a part of my journey as well and I get to be a part of his, that's really nice. How many people can say they can do that with their father?
Like I did a Toyota commercial with him and we were out in the woods in Colorado And even just the four-hour car ride there from the airport and stuff like that, we share so many father and son stories that usually we don't get to talk about. So I felt that was, like, really nice. So I'm taking the good with the bad.
Like, I think everything else, like, if he wants to take a selfie with my co-stars or whatever, great. Let him do it. Who cares? He's not bothering anyone. But I think the father and son bond and that extra connection, you just can't recreate that, and I'm grateful for that.
I know. And I think to go back a little bit to Interior Chinatown, there's an unspoken love between family, especially Asian family members. But we don't ever say I love you. Like there's a scene in the pilot you see like Willis has such a strained relationship with his father. You can tell there's a deep love, but there's also so much stubbornness and stuff and the relationship has deteriorated.
And I think at times in my life, I felt like we don't talk enough and I can't get myself to talk about the sensitive stuff to my father. But now I feel like because we're doing this, I'm able to have more of an open conversation with him. And it's such a blessing that I think a lot of people would have missed that opportunity, you know, and myself included.
I think it's a comedy show, so it has to be funny. But I think to me, whenever the funniest happens, whether it's on stage or on the screen, it's when somebody said, oh, that seems so real. You know, it has to be based on authenticity.
So I just felt like I knew this guy, whether he's an amalgamation based on people I knew myself when I first came to this country or some of my uncles with that very specific Mandarin accent. I walked into an audition with like socks, sandals and like, you know, really like I think a T-shirt with like chemical bonds on it. I just felt like I knew this guy.
And then when I got the job and I showed up on set, one of the first discussions me and Mike had, once again, it was about authenticity. I was like, Mike, I want to do a Mandarin accent for this character. I feel like that'll make more sense. He should be from mainland China instead of Hong Kong. And he was like, I don't know the difference. Just do it both ways, and then we'll figure it out.
And that's how I kind of landed in the body of that character was... based on my own observations of myself being an immigrant and also people that I've seen and I've been around, whether in Hong Kong or in China.
In the beginning, I was just trying to get a job. Like I said, there's not a lot of jobs going around. And then, yeah, I did see some, you know, writers write about it. And a lot of it was Asian-American writers. And I don't know. It didn't feel good, right?
But at the same time, I'm like, well, what am I supposed to do? You just want me to not work? I can just quit, and then you wouldn't even have me at all. But I remember approaching the role always from authenticity, from a realness, and not just making a caricature, but making a real human out of this person. And then as the season transformed—
and grew and his character grew, he went from just being the foreign guy to being kind of like the one that always got under this guy, T.J. Miller's character, Skin, who was such a bully. So he's like the anti-bully. And then he himself becomes the bully, which I thought was pretty cool. And it's not about the accent necessarily. It was about...
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