National Book Award winner Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (his second novel after How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction World) is written using a screenplay format. This is the story of a man who exists as a background actor who struggles on the periphery of police dramas. . So this was already kind of the perfect project to turn into a movie. And Hulu’s new series starring Jimmy O. Wang and executive produced by Yu and Taika Waititi seems to be starting off on the right foot. It spiraled from familiar (police procedural) to quirky heroic fantasy, trampling every stereotype along the way.
The first trailer is here ahead of the Interior Chinatown binge event in November.
The official synopsis for the series is as follows: “Based on Charles Yu’s award-winning book of the same name, the drama tells the story of Willis Wu, a background character caught up in a police procedural called Black & White. As he works his way through on-screen jobs and waits for his turn, Willis dreams of a world beyond Chinatown and aspires to be the star of his own story. As she begins to unravel Chinatown’s web of crime, she discovers her family’s hidden history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.
Yang definitely has the same protagonist energy as Willis. The rest of the cast includes the very funny Ronnie Cheng (The Daily Show), Chloe Bennet (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Lisa Gilroy, Sullivan Jones, Archie Kao, and Diana Lin. Waititi directed the pilot, and you can watch all 10 episodes of Interior Chinatown when it arrives on Hulu on November 19th.
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