Today we’d like to introduce you to Jinny Chung.
Jinny, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Growing up in Philadelphia, I was just me now, loud and annoying, but smaller if you can believe it, though with this size teeth. I was that kid with the really chapped upper lip and wet hoodie strings. I don’t remember sitting at my own desk much, as I spent most of my elementary days sitting at the teacher’s desk for talking too much. ’Course, I would then just try to yuk up the teacher, to varying degrees of success. Mr. Spinelli had to endure me acting out A1 Sauce commercials and TV spots for ‘The Birdcage’. Mr. Spinelli had to teach me the word Ritalin.
I spent entire recesses acting out things I’d seen on ‘Late Night with Conan O’Brien’ or ‘SNL’, often having to omit the parts I didn’t understand, often whole punchlines (I didn’t know what a warlord was, so my friends just sat there watching me play Phil Hartman playing Bill Clinton eating a Filet-o-Fish, which I called a Big Mac because I didn’t know what a Filet-o-Fish was).
If my friends had been able to see past my giant teeth, they would have seen the sweaty brow. I made a habit of preemptively calling attention to my errors, sometimes even going so far as to criticize peers for failing to see how sucky I’d just been. I was constantly blaming myself for things that often didn’t even involve me, so it goes without saying that I didn’t take my parents’ divorce well.
I had lofty taste as a kid. My sister was a huge Beatles fan, and I was quick to copy anything my big sister did. Dad got initial custody but under his roof it was television that raised us. We watched everything basic cable had to offer — ‘Dateline’, ‘The Pretender’, ‘ER’ — but our golden time was late-night comedy. I still have in my possession a wobbly VHS recording of Paul McCartney’s ‘Late Night’ interview, labeled accordingly in my sister’s fangirl hand. And we had tapes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton so I got a leg up on learning about those guys, thanks to my father — the most serious man in the world.
Circumstances got extra circumstancey when my mom moved to L.A. Her plan was to move us out there, but only I followed. My sister stayed in Pennsylvania and went on to Harvard. In high school, I joined the Speech team, thereby cementing my enthusiasm for making a jackass of myself to loved ones and complete strangers. Once, in tenth grade, I gelled my hair, put on a too-big trench coat and sang ‘Take On Me’ to passing students on the front steps, just to get my friends to laugh. After school, we walked to a Chinese restaurant, where my fortune read, “Don’t be afraid to dance badly.” Then my friends laughed.
I continued to be drawn to things I couldn’t have totally understood at that age, like Hitchcock movies, PG Wodehouse and ‘The Producers: The Musical’. The last one in particular was the formative thing. For junior and senior year, I competed at state for my Humorous and Duo Interpretations of the Producers musical. Between Speech team and doing Shakespeare in drama class, I knew I didn’t just want to act, but that I wasn’t horrible at it. It was around this time that I started writing sketches and filming my friends’ every move with a camcorder I took from my uncle without asking.
I went on to UC San Diego, where I majored in Psychology and watched a lot of Jacques Tati and Wong Kar Wai. After college, I moved back home to L.A., weaving through film development internships, day jobs, and auditions.
–I say auditions, but that’s not to say that I was committed to auditioning. And that’s not to say that I didn’t want to act. I wanted to get into acting and comedy, but I sat on my hands for a few years, paralyzed by indecision, almost in denial that I could think I’d have anything unique to offer an audience. When I finally accepted that I wanted to give it a shot anyway, I dove in. How’s it going, you ask? Well, have you ever belly flopped into a dry in-ground pool?
I auditioned for on-camera parts for a few years before I got pulled in to voiceover. I’d flirted with the idea of adding voiceover to my resume, so I signed up for classes and threw down the money for a demo. After a series of day jobs and bad bosses, I scored a job in production at Frederator Studios for ‘Costume Quest’ on Amazon Prime. Even as deep as a year in, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s been one of my biggest breaks yet!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The whole road’s been whack-a-mole. I can’t help but wonder if it’d be easier if I weren’t a five-foot Asian-American woman with a reedy voice and useless wrists. In nearly every job I’ve had — whether it was a means-to-an-end day job or a costar on a primetime network drama — I’ve had moments when I’d have to squint to see through that thick fog in the room: people, usually men, waiting for me to explain why I’m taking up a chair in the room. A few jobs ago, a supervisor told me, “You don’t act like you look. Maybe that’s why people think you’re pretending to be mean when you’re actually just getting your work done.” I’d stood there, blinking until they set the alarm for the night.
I know how it is: when a short Asian woman walks into the room, there’s a preconception. Not only a preconception of what she is but of what she ‘should’ be. I’ve looked into the eyes of many who have glanced my way then furrowed their brow the second I open my mouth. When this happens, I can see the cranial rejiggering. “W-w-wait, why aren’t you stepping aside for me or thanking me for letting you pass? Why are you talking when I should be interrupting you to explain something you already know? –Oh excuse me, you don’t get to crack jokes, you’re only supposed to giggle at mine! What the hell are you?” One dude found me so confounding his nose started bleeding.
The process of auditioning fries me. It’s one thing to memorize lines and try to create a visually dynamic audition for a thumbnail Mr. Producer may never even click on, but the introspective drama I’ll put myself through could discourage any doe-eyed ingenue. After a bad audition, I’m a bull in a china shop, but the china shop is a Popeye’s and I’m a bull wearing a child’s-size doctor costume.
And to parrot the La-La-Land elegy: it’s tough to juggle work and auditions. Hell, even just the inconsistency of living in a city like L.A. can tax your day-to-day. Slugging through traffic on a lunch break, changing in my car at the corner of Sunset and Vine for a part I won’t get anyway can be disheartening… but hey, in a town like this, I’d rather be overwhelmed than underwhelmed.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I’m an improviser, writer and actor here in L.A. Already I’m a dime a dozen. I wouldn’t say my accomplishments on paper set me apart from other actor/writers in this Starbucks, but my approach to new material may. I’ve never been interested in dating, and as year-after-no-action-year passes, I see it’s my aromantic sensibilities that put a bug in my ear. Every nothing-or-minutiae moment of my life is filtered through it. I’ll walk into, say, this Starbucks (in case I haven’t mentioned it, I’m sitting in a Starbucks), beeline to the far corner table, take the seat looking out at the other pitiables and no matter what their behavior, I’ll chalk it up to what’s gotta be their sexual motives, because after all, that’s really all that most ‘normal’ people care about, right? What’s it like not to be repulsed by sustained eye contact and bare collarbones? But then I’ll shake my head, dismiss the thought and look back down at my screen to click page 43 of the skyscraper message board I’m following.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I’m honored to be the lead of ‘Search History’, a short film that’s making its way around the festival circuit right now, written by Elisa Oh and directed by Christina Jun. It’s about a self-serving millennial Korean-American podcast host who gets her grandmother a genetic testing kit in hopes that the results will make for a juicy story. Don’t worry, humble pie is eaten. When I read for it, I was already telling myself that I wouldn’t get the chance to work on something as meaningful as this, a film written by a Korean-American woman and directed by a Korean-American woman. You could imagine how stoked I was when I found myself on set with Christina and Elisa at the helm. It’s not the biggest project I’ve booked, but it’s by far the most significant. With or without me, the movie needed to get made!
As for live performance, I’m on an improv team that performs every other Sunday in Hollywood. The Cabal specializes in monoscenes, so we’re just chucking characters at each other and having a blast. I’m one of the team’s newest members, and they’re all so talented and textured, I’m humbled they let me swing around their branches.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: jinnyxchung
- Twitter: jurrrk
Image Credit:
Gabriela Fresquez, Daryl Jim Diaz, NewfilmmakersLA, Bentonville Film Festival
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