Another new interview with Sandra Oh from today's
Metro UK where Sandra talks about "her attempts to master an English accent for her new role in
Thorne: Scaredycat and the challenges of carving out a career in LA".
Grey's Anatomy actress Sandra Oh tells Metro about her attempts to master an English accent for her new role in Thorne: Scaredycat and the challenges of carving out a career in LA.
You would think any actress on hiatus from a hit US TV show would be chilling out somewhere hot and exotic. Not Sandra Oh. In the middle of a break from playing cynical doctor Cristina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy, she’s opted to play a cocaine-addicted London cop in the second instalment of Sky1’s gritty Thorne double whammy.
‘At first I didn’t want to do a project this big; I was very tired,’ admits the Golden Globe-winning actress, her smooth voice rendered croaky by a cold as she sits in a posh hotel in Soho.
‘But you know what? I think I was just scared. So I took it on because of the challenge. My character, Detective Sarah Chen, has very self-destructive vulnerabilities. Many times I’ve thought she might be a terrible cop.’
In Thorne: Scaredycat, she joins David Morrissey and The Wire star Aidan Gillen on a new case: a killer is on the loose and the victims are connected by their passage through St Pancras station. Amid it all, Oh’s detective is an unpredictable presence.
‘Chen is hinged, and those kinds of people are one way in one scene and another way in another scene,’ she says.
‘In comparison to the character I’ve been playing for years in Grey’s Anatomy, it’s like night and day. Cristina Yang is a second skin. This is something brand new.’
Oh drips with thespian intensity as she ponders all this. ‘No, no, no, don’t worry about it, no method acting here,’ she laughs reassuringly as I wonder at the lengths she might have gone to in order to get inside the head of a coke fiend.
‘All you have to do is just realise that we’re all addicted to something. Maybe to your BlackBerry or food – you just need to find those tiny little kernels.’
Channelling her inner drug addict was tough, then, but for this Canadian native, perfecting an English accent to portray autor Mark Billingham’s character was even harder.
‘In America we emphasise and stress things much more than you guys do,’ she says. ‘And your thought processes are longer. You don’t notice until you have to do an accent and then you think, why does it sound kind of not right? It’s painful, it sounds so terrible. But you just keep on at it and then it ends up being a muscle memory.’
Added to this transatlantic baptism of fire was her first scene of shooting with Morrissey, in which she had to ‘stick my hands down his pants’. ‘Which is always slightly awkward but he was like: “Hey, hi, how are you doing?” It saved my life…’
Oh may have found the demands of this three-part cop show overwhelming, then, but she’s the archetypal acting nerd. She says she likes to treat each character like a little hobby (‘For Grey’s you get to watch surgery. Who gets to do that?’) and began acting at the tender age of ten. Her first professional gig was in her mid-teens – an industrial film for youngsters about the dangers of drink-driving.
‘I was in a classroom and people were doing a mock trial. I was one of the students playing one of the lawyers,’ she laughs. ‘Oh God, I’ve done a lot of public and industrial films. I’m sure there are some terrible tapes out there somewhere.’
By the time she got to LA, there was some knocking on doors to do. ‘Being someone not from the mainstream and not white – as an actor, it’s something that you always carry around,’ says Oh, whose parents moved to Canada from South Korea. ‘No matter what, you always feel the outsider.’
The fact that Grey’s Anatomy took the risk in casting her is one of the things she’s most proud of about the show.
‘I do think Grey’s opened up the concept of casting a bit more. It’s something that I would hope opens up more in England. Just look at London,’ she implores, of the city she’s only visited once before. ‘You have such an amazing mix of people. I’m super-impressed by it.’
The success of Grey’s Anatomy has, however, been a double-edged sword. ‘I don’t do press very often,’ she states cautiously. ‘It’s a very tricky and difficult relationship we actors/artists have with the press. It’s different in people who want to be celebrities. This is one of the ways Grey’s has changed my life, doing press. But I absolutely think it brought me here so I’m very grateful to it.’
And with that, I leave her to use what little time she has left to explore the capital. Has she unleashed that English accent on the unsuspecting public yet? ‘One cab driver thought I was from Australia,’ she says. ‘I was like, no I’m not… but I’m much closer to the accent now.’
