Stephanie Hsu Is Balancing Visibility and Artistry

Stephanie Hsu was in Vancouver filming the Peacock series Laid when she said to her writer and fellow executive producer Nahnatchka Khan, “We have to have a wrap party!”

“No one does wrap parties anymore,” Hsu lamented—but she felt that they had worked too hard to not have a wrap party. Luckily, Khan and her production partner Jennifer Carreras rallied behind Hsu to send Laid off in style.

When the moment came, it struck Hsu how hard people, especially Khan, had fought to have her there. “There’s so many people who had to say yes to that,” from executives to financial backers, to not only have Hsu as the lead but also one of the executive producers.

Both on screen and off, Hsu exhibits a kind of effervescent spontaneity that belies the fact that her decisions are studied and deliberate. Laid is the 34-year-old’s first time stepping into the role of executive producer and her dedication was clear: she would unwind after filming by staying up till 4 AM to review footage. But some of her favorite moments on set also came from Friday Dress Up, which she was inspired to start after seeing an assistant in an “amazing” rainbow tracksuit. Winners were allowed to pick the next week’s theme, which ranged from ‘Dress up like your grandma’ to ‘Dress up like someone else on set.’

Hsu felt that creating an environment where people could play, without ego, was very much in her remit as executive producer. After working with directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Schneider in her Oscar-nominated role of Joy/Jobu Tupaki in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once, Hsu says, “I got to see what it’s like when you make something where everyone in the room feels valued.”

From the Daniels, as Kwan and Schneider are collectively known, she had learned to imagine a film set as a dinner party. “Everybody has their specialty that they like to make, and your job is to make sure there's enough room at the table for everyone to be able to share,” she says.

Laid follows Hsu’s character Ruby and her true crime-obsessed best friend AJ, played by Zosia Mamet, as they realize that Ruby’s former sexual partners are dying one by one in the order in which she slept with them. Neither has any idea why, but while Ruby tries to find out the reason it appears that her vagina is hexed, she also tries to track down her former partners to warn them—after all, she feels, it’s the moral thing to do.

The show is based on an Australian series of the same name released in 2011, but the Peacock remake feels particularly apt for our post-pandemic era. For the original, a newspaper obituary inspired Australian screenwriter Marieke Hardy to explore how someone’s death can impact social relationships; death was a benign, comedic plot device for an audience which had largely remained cushioned from the 2008 recession, thanks to the country’s mining economy.

The 2024 version is being released in more cynical times, when optimism is slightly harder to come by—but Hsu gives Ruby plenty of hope to make up for it. Ruby is a die-hard romantic who desperately wants and believes in love, even as multiple people, spurred by her unusual circumstances, tell her how blindly self-centered she is. Hsu wanted to show that swelling violin background music and The Notebook-style kisses in the rain aren’t out of reach, even in the modern era—but Ruby had to be prepared to put in the effort. “Ruby genuinely loves love and loves the idea of it,” says Hsu, “but the practice of being in a relationship or being in love is difficult and requires work.”

Whether Hsu is playing a charming party planner, a multiverse-jumping nihilist, a kleptomaniac drifter as in Natasha Lyonne’s Poker Face, or a very horny wuxia actress in Joy Ride, she tends to imbue her characters with playful, random quirks that seem extravagant plot-wise but make her characters endearingly human.

When it comes to choosing roles, Hsu needs a very clear purpose. “There’s so much content [out there] that I really, really want to know why someone or some people are coming together to make a movie, and what about the story feels important now,” she says. But once she’s in, she’s in. “I don’t care how big or small the role is, I just want to be there to support.” And when it comes to her characters, “I definitely am very ‘why not?’” she says. “If the creative environment is right then and safe, then I’m like, ‘Wow, what a joy it is to just try anything and see what we find along the way.’”

Hsu was born and raised in Los Angeles—by a single mother from Taiwan; she describes her upbringing simply as “first generation”— but her acting reveals the fearlessness of the avant garde born from New York’s experimental theater scene. For college, she went to NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she joined Hammerkatz, the university’s Donald Glover-founded sketch comedy group, and became friends with Bowen Yang. The composer and director Liz Swados became her professor and mentor, and planted the seeds for a social consciousness in Hsu’s art. Like Laid, Hsu’s thesis also explored the concept of love, but here she combined music, poetry, and dance for a collectively improvised piece where the all-female cast played mermaids. “Honestly, I think it was really good,” she laughs. “Sometimes I think about making it into a movie.”

Hsu ended up staying east for eleven years. Throughout this time, she also dove into contact improvisation, a form of dance that requires paying astute attention to one’s body, the other dancer’s body, and gravity—she describes it as “improvisational dance where you roll on top of each other”—and fell in love with the work of performers Meredith Monk and Merce Cunningham. She played a singing hand in a queer Inuit myth-inspired musical, War Lesbians, and says that “clowning in general” was important to her. “I was definitely the type of person who could watch a one-person show in a black box theater in a basement and have it be silent the whole time and I'd be like, ‘I love that,’ you know what I mean?” she says.

She ended up on Broadway, where she played the evil supercomputer Karen in SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical and high school theater nerd Christine Canigula in the viral teen hit musical Be More Chill. While performing eight times a week in the latter’s Broadway run, she spent her free day portraying the ambitious and independent Mei Lin in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Then Bowen Yang called her about the Comedy Central sitcom Awkwafina is Nora From Queens. There she met the Daniels, who directed her in one episode as the glamorous, fierce, yet deadpan Shu Shu, who recounts her dislike of manual labor and the perilous journey from communist China to the U.S.—and the seventy-five sharks she fought along the way—by way of shadow puppets.

When the Daniels returned to Los Angeles, she went too. At the time, Hsu wasn’t sure if she wanted to move back to California permanently or not, so she stayed with Schneider for a few months. Filming for Everything Everywhere All At Once started a week after she landed and soon enough she decided to stay. “It’s very special to get to meet creatives that you feel so artistically aligned with, that you get to sort of fall in love with before anyone is sparkly or fancy—and then you get to go on this crazy journey that is suddenly so public-facing and comes with so many high notes and low notes that such a few percentage of human beings have ever experienced,” she says of the ensuing film’s long road to the Best Picture Oscar. “The fact that we have that common language because we all went through it together is really a gift.”

Hsu deeply values how art can be a form of collective processing. “It’s funny, I’m reading some scripts right now where they’re so dark in a way that sometimes I think people are not ready to feel how dark it is and just want to be entertained. Other times, it’s so dark that actually the only thing that can help you feel better is to have someone to articulate the darkness for you.”

“I do think we are so in need of those cultural touchstones where we can process together,” she adds. “I really hope movie theaters stay, because those are the spaces where we go together to witness a story together.”

For her part, Hsu is grappling with the balance of keeping her independent artistry alive alongside her growing prominence. “When you start to do things that are more visible, there's a little bit more of that ‘What’s next?’” she says. “[So] where do you find it in yourself and find opportunities where you, as an artist, can continue to experiment in a way that feels fearless and also within the bounds of an industry? That is a very interesting little dance for the weirdos like me.”

Outside of her industry, she likes to cook and feed people, and also ground herself in permaculture. While in college, she worked on a farm upstate, and she will sometimes shout out community farms like Brooklyn’s Oko Farms on her Instagram. “My god, do I wish that I could just be a novelist living in the middle of nowhere, writing prolific books,” she adds. “I wish that could be me, but I need people and I need collaborative feedback and the bouncing of ideas. That’s the thing that makes this all feel the most fun and joyful and the most worth it.”

Laid is now streaming on Peacock. Read this story and many more in print by ordering CERO 9 here. Stephanie has selected Solar Punk Farms, a queer-run, sustainable regenerative hub in Northern California, as the recipient of proceeds from direct sales of CERO 9.