I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized - to give them new life as a new kind of fantasy that isn't so cloying and exotic and strange.
I want to break that typical Asian female stereotype. There's this standard where they're all calm. I want to break that.
Everyone's supposed to stay in their lines and be neat. 'You're a rapper. You're supposed to rap, carry a boom box, wear chains, and go to the club - that's all you do. What are you doing collecting art? What are you talking about? Wait a minute, you're getting out of the zone.' People hate when people cross lines.
That's one of the things I really respect and admire about 'Doctor Who', is that they're always thinking out of the box with the characters they write and the actor they employ to portray them. They're always challenging the stereotypes and peoples' way of thinking.
I've always wanted to play a normal woman, and I think I have been offered these parts where I play a kook because I'm not the idea of what a normal woman is.
I've become really good at turning down the boring, pretty girl roles, the trophy wife, supermodel, beautiful girlfriend roles. I mean, playing somebody who's perfect holds no allure for me, whatsoever. It's just boring.
I come from surfing, and surfing is the worst cool-guy industry of all. I decided long ago to try and kill the cool guy.
I don't want to push barriers myself. You go to see Joan Rivers to see barriers being pushed. You watch 'Little Britain' to see barriers being pushed.
I played the ingenue, of course, when I was young - but even with those, I tried to make interesting choices and mess them up a little bit - make them layered and complicated and not all stereotypes.
When I was growing up, I loved stories in which a girl sets out on a quest to rescue the prince instead of the other way around.
My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it's a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.
I was asked once if I ever got tired of playing bimbos, and I answered that I've never played a bimbo. I've always played smart, manipulative women. Marilyn Monroe and Judy Holliday, who were not stupid, could play stupid really well, but I don't do it well.
Don't live up to your stereotypes.
I guess I blow all the stereotypes right out of the water.
I loved all the other movies, and I loved all the other movie stars, but I was very aware of the fact that I didn't look like Marilyn Monroe - although I still wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. Then Josephine Baker popped up, and she wasn't the maid - she was the star of the show. To me, it was mind-blowing.
Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.
Eventually we got to a point where 'Riverdale' came along, and it was a character that was originally written white, and I saw this as an opportunity to take a classic American character and make them Asian.
I broke a lot of conventions. Look, I spent a long time as an actor. I spent a lot of time playing pretty ordinary arcs.
I'm not interested in playing the villain as a loud caricature, one-dimensional character. I am trying to humanise evil. If you see my character in 'Aurangzeb,' I am not trying to act evil.
