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
I'm not saying I want someone to die. So what are you saying? Well, I'm saying if someone's already dead, I would like to be the person who'll find the body. That's weird, man. Okay, you know how in cop shows, there's usually a cold open? Cold open. The first scene before the main titles. Right.
Okay, so for a couple of minutes, you follow this random character who you've never met, who's not one of the leads. And part of you is thinking, why am I even watching this guy? Why are you watching this guy? You're watching because either he's about to get killed, or... Or... You've seriously never seen a cop show? How is that even possible? Video games and weed. Okay. What was I saying?
Somebody's about to find a dead body? Yes, that's the rule. The person in the first scene of a procedural is either a victim or a witness. Holy .
You're a , man. I'm the . You were the one who was hoping it was a dead person.
Thank you so much, Anne-Marie. First of all, I'm a big fan. And second of all, I think you should introduce me at every single one of my shows from now on.
Well, first of all, when I first got the script, I knew that it was based on a book. I love reading books, but I get distracted very quickly. And I'm like, oh, man, I got to read the script and the book. That's a lot of pages. But then I rifled through a book in like half a day. It was just so engaging. And I really felt like it spoke to me.
as an Asian American, as an actor, as an artist, and I think just as an outsider, as someone who felt like I was always in the background of my life and I always have to find a way to sneak in. And I'm like, man, It almost sounded like the book was based on my climb and struggle in my career. From Willis being a background guy, which I was. From Willis having a bit part, which I was.
I was Chinese teenager number two. I was person in line. And to Willis becoming the tech guy, which I was on Silicon Valley. So I just really connected to the role. And of course the book and the script were so well written by Charlie Yu. I felt really passionate about it. Rarely does a script or something land on my desk where I felt a personal connection with.
And from then on, I was like, man, I got to get this. I got to do this.
Yeah, I think, first of all, that scene, it really made me smile when I think about it. It's almost like an old-school physical comedy scene where Willis, me, I was trying to get into this door in the police precinct, and I can't. Like a Monty Python or something, like a sketch. So it made me laugh, and I had a lot of fun doing it. But there's such a deeper meaning on, hey, you don't belong here.
And then he had to find a lot of ways to sneak in, which, in a way, I kind of felt... Like that in my career. I didn't go to Juilliard or NYU like a fancy acting school or something like that. I had to do open mics where I pay $5, five minutes of stage time, and then kind of snuck in by doing some commercials.
So in a way, I think that's very true to my own experience and I think to the Asian-American experience where a lot of times we feel invisible and that invisibility has been internalized. That we don't think about it every day, but we just accepted it. And in a way, that's even more dangerous.
Yeah. like the tagline of the show, the poster of the show is me getting kicked out of a window, you know, and, which is a fun scene. I'm not going to give too much away. But, it's break out of your role. That's the tagline of the show. And I thought it really is that it's breaking out of the role that society expects you of.
It's breaking out of a role that your family expects you of, you know, and we all have that Asian or not, you know, like my family expected me to be an engineer, a good student, definitely not a comedian, you know, and an actor. And society expects me to be the model minority, you know, And then I have to prove to myself that this is possible.
There's so much nuance within Chinese culture. With Shanghainese parents, I grew up speaking Shanghainese to them. I still speak Shanghainese to them, which is a local dialect. In Hong Kong, it's its own place, especially when I was growing up. It spoke Cantonese.
And Cantonese people love making fun of people speaking Cantonese with an accent, whether it's Shanghainese accent, a Mandarin accent, whatever. So I grew up even in Hong Kong, like somewhat foreign, because my parents were from Shanghai. Like my dad would show up to school, pick me up, and they'll come to Shanghai, which in Cantonese means, you know, the Shanghai guy.
They're making fun of him as a foreigner, although he's also Chinese, of course. So there's cultural differences, even when I was born in Hong Kong. But I think it helped shape my, I don't know, maybe linguistic skills to have to learn Shanghainese at home, to have to learn Cantonese in school, and to have to learn Mandarin in between when I was watching Chinese TV shows.
Maybe that eased my transition when I moved here to America to learn English.
I think there's many sides of Beverly Hills. They lived in like an apartment in Beverly Hills. That wasn't very fancy at all. It was like one block away from not being Beverly Hills. And eventually my dad actually used that address. as a fake address to get me into Beverly Hills High School. So I think, I'm telling you this now, I think the statute of limitations is up.
I don't think he'll go to jail.
Showing 81–100 of 225 · page 5 of 12
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