The actress Stephanie Hsu talks about how clothes convey the full range of character in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a new and genre-defying film set in an expansive multiverse, identity isn’t fixed but fractured into a constellation of possibilities.
The movie’s central characters — Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh), her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), and their daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu) — travel through various universes as they fight to save their struggling family business and to defeat an all-powerful villain named Jobu Tupaki, who has taken up residence in Joy’s human form. As they jump from one timeline to the next, the characters inhabit numerous distinct selves: their alternate destinies, their untapped skills and their sartorial sensibilities.
“I think it’s so rare that you get to experience the scope of range within one character in one movie,” Ms. Hsu, 31, said in a Zoom interview on Saturday.
Playing both Joy and Jobu required the actress to mine the depths of depression and explore the destructive highs of mania — an emotional range that the film conveys in part through costume.
“She is so despondent and so lost and has so much despair and carries that ugliness with her,” Ms. Hsu said of Joy, who is introduced in a somber flannel shirt and an oversize hoodie, the kind of clothing people wear to hide. “But I knew that I could really go there with her because I also was about to get to wear the most fabulous things and be a nemesis.”
Jobu’s style is loud, experimental and confrontational. She shows up at various points in head-to-toe tartan, her face obscured by a mask and visor; a preppy pink polo with an argyle sweater vest and a pleated skirt, wielding a golf club as a weapon; a sparkly white Elvis-inspired jumpsuit and a pink wig; a psychedelic zip-up with teddy bears on either sleeve. Her makeup is, likewise, unsubtle and unnerving: She paints red hearts on her cheeks and covers her face in pearls and rhinestones. (A keen observer may notice that one gem is shaped like a teardrop.)
Ms. Hsu said the teardrop and hearts were meant to tether the ruthless Jobu to Joy, who, despite her constant conflicts with her mother, still wants the best for her family. During a fight scene with Evelyn, Jobu wears an outfit that is pure chaos, mashing up the character’s many dissonant styles to an alarming effect. But when she lifts up a fist, she reveals a glove with a cutout in the shape of a heart.
“I remember putting that glove on and being like, ‘I love that this fist is actually still symbolizing love and that we’re having this fist fight,’” Ms. Hsu said. “It was just such a helpful reminder for me.”
She emphasized that all of the looks were the product of a close collaboration between the film’s costume designer, Shirley Kurata (whom she described as “an artistic genius”), and the directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
“The three of them are maximalists who still care deeply about aesthetics,” Ms. Hsu said. “And so even though I was wearing really crazy things, sometimes it was really important that it was still fabulous and very couture.” Anissa Salazar, who oversaw the production’s hair department, and Michelle Chung, the head of makeup, also contributed to the overall effect.
Ms. Hsu said that the look that took the longest to complete was “Goddess Jobu,” as she referred to it, for which she wore a long white gown, an Elizabethan ruff, iridescent makeup and a braided hairdo that culminated in a bagel-like bun at the crown of her head.
“The bagel was a hairpiece,” she said. “And then there are these braids that go across my hair. So that took a lot of glue and things like that. But that one was actually easier than it looked.”
Much more challenging, she said, was putting on all the layers of the outfit. “There was a leather bodysuit, leggings, a skirt, gloves and then these arm shields,” she said. “And then we had to also hang jewels on my body.”
Ms. Hsu was cast in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” in 2019, a week after she moved to Los Angeles from New York City, a place that had shaped her sense of style.
“I lived in New York for 11 years. I think that New York really gave me functional swag because you have to walk everywhere,” Ms. Hsu said. “But now when I’m in L.A., it’s really fun to wear fun shoes. I love shoes.”
She said that working on the film, seeing herself in Jobu’s various costumes and hearing responses from fans of the movie also gave her the confidence to unlock a more expressive mode of dressing.
“I feel like my freak flag flew way higher when I was younger,” Ms. Hsu said, “and so I think I’m trying to embrace that again.”
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
