Cory Stillman
Actor Duy Nguyen was born and raised in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, moving to Canada as an international student in 2014. Nguyen quickly fell in love with American pop culture, finding a particular fascination with HBO and its iconic Sunday night slate of shows.
“I’m a big fan of HBO. I love HBO Sundays, my favorite time of the week,” says Nguyen.
The young actor now finds himself a part of those very Sundays, starring as Man in Park Chan-Wook‘s The Sympathizer. The show is based off of Viet Than Nguyen‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. Nguyen read the book in 2016, intrigued by the similarities between its author’s Vietnamese-American identity and his own.
Of course, that dual identity is central to the story of The Sympathizer, which follows the Captain, a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army who remains undercover whilst living as an expat in the United States. Both the show and novel are therefore rife with hilariously profound insights on American and Vietnamese culture.
For Nguyen, The Sympathizer marked one of the first periods of his life in which he fully wrestled with the Vietnam War and the multiplicity of perspectives on the conflict.
“The first time the Vietnam War was mentioned to me, I was already in Canada,” says Nguyen. “In Vietnam, we called it the American War, or the Resistant War Against America. It’s kind of funny because the Vietnamese people in Vietnam don’t carry the trauma of having to leave the country, so we just collectively moved on from it.”
Nguyen plays Man in The Sympathizer, the Captain’s close friend and handler, who stays in Vietnam and learns about America strictly through the letters that the Captain sends back home.
“This is the kind of role that you let an A-lister play,” says Nguyen. “You have to really transform yourself to be a different person, so I was quite excited to learn that I got the part.”
But Nguyen could relate to Man’s filtered education of American culture, and credits his intimate understanding of the character’s pivotal role in the story with his landing of the role. Fans of the book may already know that there is more to Man than meets the eye, and newcomers to the series should pay special attention to Nguyen as his performance unfolds across The Sympathizer‘s seven episodes.
I spoke with Nguyen about his work on the show, as well as his experiences collaborating with icons like Park Chan-Wook and Robert Downey Jr.. You can listen to the full conversation below.
New episodes of The Sympathizer air on HBO and stream on Max every Sunday night.
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