Hong Chau Is Everywhere This Season—Including the Oscar Race

You mentioned Showing Up. Kelly Reichardt, one of our great filmmakers. And it’s another character where you get to have some fun. There’s a lot of pigeon acting, particularly.

Yeah. I would say almost all of her movies feature some sort of animal, right? 

Yes, they do.

In a very charming way. I feel like there are no small parts in a Kelly Reichardt movie. She gives each person or animal some special frame or moment. I was tickled that I would get to work with a pigeon, in what I think is her first comedy. My very first day meeting Michelle Williams was during pigeon training.

With all of these projects—you’re also in the new Wes Anderson movie that’s coming up, and on and on, I could go—it’s a very exciting time. I read that after Downsizing, you’d taken a little break, particularly from bigger mainstream projects, and said no to some things. Was there a kind of shift for you in starting to say yes to more of them? 

It’s easy to say yes to Darren Aronofsky and Kelly Reichardt and Wes Anderson and Mark Mylod. [Lauhs] These are pretty easy yeses. The only thing that complicates it now is just making sure that it still works for my family. I’m not as single-minded in terms of my priorities. I think I’m just interested in living life. It took me a while to get my career going and then once I actually did, I got to start with the very best, like Inherent Vice was my first movie and then Downsizing was my second movie. Even The Whale, I think, is only my fifth or sixth movie. It’s not like I have a long resume.

Between this chunk that we talked about, you mentioned wanting to try new things. Was there anything that felt scary-new, like, “I am diving into something that I have not done before.”

Each one was so different, you know? With The Whale, there was so much dialogue and the script was still very much like the play, and the way we rehearsed it and worked our way into it was still very much very theatrical. Then Showing Up was so completely different because we shot The Whale in February in upstate New York, and there was three feet of snow on the ground; it felt cold and we were just there every day in this warehouse, in the dark, all day long. Then to get to go to Portland in the spring, it just felt like we were hanging out. Kelly would joke, “This movie shouldn’t be called Showing Up. It should be called Hanging Out.” And I couldn’t have anticipated how physical that role was. When I was reading it on the page, it felt very light and funny and my focus was on the art and being an artist. But I’d have to do a tire swing and drive a pickup truck and do this art that was actually very physical.

It had different demands. There wasn’t a lot of text or a lot of dialogue, and sometimes I enjoy that, where you get to try to sit in the space of a character and just be that person. Then there are other times, like The Whale, where it’s like, Oh, I get this amazing monologue! I can go either way. I think it’s just about variety and whatever feels right  for the scene, for the character, for the movie. 

I actually cut some of my own lines from The Menu because I didn’t feel like I needed to say them. Mark was laughing like, “You’re the only actor I know who asks to cut lines.” I’m like, Well, if you don’t need it!

This interview has been edited and condensed.