How Stephanie Hsu Wielded Chaos as the ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Villain

Stephanie Hsu knows it sound crazy, but when she first got the pitch for her dual role in Everything Everywhere All At Once, “It really made a lot of sense to me.” As the 31-year-old actor says now,  “I really could see the thread of it and really understood the philosophical concept of it.”

Hsu already knew the writing-directing duo The Daniels—Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — from a 2019 episode of Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens, so she had a firm grasp on their affinity for unusual storytelling. So it turns out a story in which she’d play both Joy, the frustrated daughter of Michelle Yeoh’s character and Jobu, a couture-wearing, all-powerful villain determined on imploding the world with an everything bagel didn’t phase her much. 

Hsu, a Broadway actress most recently seen onscreen in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, has always gravitated to these sort of slice of life stories that “get exploded,” as she describes it — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of her favorite films. She dove right in to the process of figuring out how she’d play this pair of very different characters, by focusing on what united them.

“We always say that Joy and Jobu are actually two very different expressions of the same philosophy,” says Hsu. “To me, they share the same exact heartbeat, they just respond to it very differently.”

We meet Hsu’s Joy Wang in Everything Everywhere All At Once early on, when she goes to talk to her mother Evelyn (Yeoh) at the laundromat run by her parents. She’s dressed down in a flannel shirt, her long hair in a simple mid-part, and she’s begging for her mother to acknowledge her relationship with her girlfriend. But Evelyn isn’t hearing her, making Joy feel invisible. 

“Because I knew how crazy Jobu was going to be, I knew I wanted to take Joy all the way in the other direction — subtle and unassuming so that the surprise of Jobu could be really satisfying,” says Hsu.

We don’t meet Jobu Tupaki until after Evelyn has been introduced to the multiverse and told that there’s an evil force out there bent on annihilation. Soon, we learn that Jobu— an alternative universe version of Joy—became all powerful because she was pushed by her own mother to verse-jump so many times that she fractured and now experiences everything, everywhere, at the same exact time.

Because of Jobu’s belief that nothing matters, Hsu and the Daniels spent a lot of time talking about nihilism. “We wanted to make sure that we created a villain that wasn’t just scary or weird for no reason, that they had a very core philosophy,” says Hsu, who also dug deep into the experience of hyper-empathy as a part of her research. “In a world where we’re saturated by news and noise and media that can pull someone into the deep end of being so overwhelmed by the chaos that they can’t even find a way out. And then there’s another person who might be so over sensitized to all that chaos that they just create more.”