Next month, comedian Ali Wong will star in her first dramatic role on Netflix, in a dark comedy series called Beef. Her role is described as “a high-achieving working wife and mother whose road-rage encounter pushes her into increasingly destructive territory” and Steven Yeun plays the other half of the road-rage scenario. Sounds intriguing. The Hollywood Reporter profiled Ali ahead of the series premiere on April 6 and here are some highlights:
On her relationship with her ex-husband: She recently watched the first two episodes with her ex-husband, Justin Hakuta — the two announced their divorce in April 2022, while she was filming Beef. ” ‘Ali, it’s really good,’ ” she recalls him saying. ” ‘And I also feel like our lives might change again.’” “We’re really, really close; we’re best friends. We’ve been through so much together. It’s a very unconventional divorce,” says Wong, who played pickleball with her ex-husband on this very morning and will travel with him and their daughters when she goes back on tour in June with new material about her post-divorce dating life (she was briefly linked to Bill Hader late last year).
On how much of herself she puts into her work: I don’t put the pressure of ‘this is the whole me’ [on my work]. All of this — my stand-up, Beef, Always Be My Maybe, how I am with my friends, how they relay a conversation I had with them — is never going to be the whole truth. It is always going to be an abstraction of truth, and I think that’s very comforting. I can’t help what people expect. I don’t try to control what they think or take away at all. That’s not the goal. The goal is to surprise them and make them laugh and make myself laugh and have fun.
On how she grew up: “I’m very blessed, I think, because of how I grew up. Other Asian American people in entertainment have spoken to this when they’re like, ‘You just seem very free.’ I haven’t known any other way. I have my [family] and the communities that I grew up in to thank for that.” Wong credits her parents for immersing her and her three older siblings in the Asian American community as well as for nurturing their creative expression from a young age.”
[From The Hollywood Reporter]
I remember being pretty surprised and yet somehow not when Ali and her husband announced their divorce last year. So much of her standup was about him, their sex life, swapping breadwinner roles, that when they did announce their divorce I wondered if all the attention had anything to do with it. Is talking about your spouse a lot in standup the kiss of death for a comedian’s marriage (ahemJohnMulaney)? But with Ali it sounds like there’s no scorched earth there and they’re still very close. Though if he is touring with her and their daughters, it might be a little awkward to go back to chilling right after a bunch of jokes about her new single life. Anyway, I like what Ali says about her work being an abstraction of truth. And it’s nice that she gives props to how she grew up because there is still dearth of Asian Americans in the entertainment community. Ali still loves touring and how it works for her family, and smaller venues, and plans to focus on standup for the near future.
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Photos credit: Max S Gerber/Netflix, Milla Cochran/startraksphoto.com, Getty and THR via Instagram
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