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At precisely three o’clock, Rosalind Chao bounds into a chic hotel restaurant a block from Carnegie Hall. “I didn’t have time to change,” she apologizes, gesturing to the belted orange-vermillion shirt dress that’s nearly as bright as her smile. “This,” she says, gesturing to her hair and Makeup, “is because I was on Good Morning America.” Then she holds up a much more mass-market backpack. “This is Roz.”
Chao has been on a publicity march for nearly two weeks, hyping the release of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, in which she plays Ye Wenjie—a genius Chinese scientist now living in England who, depending on your point of view, either rescues humanity or condemns us all to our doom. The series is the first substantial work from showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss since the end of Game of Thrones. (There is a third showrunner for this production as well: True Blood and The Terror alum Alexander Woo.) Promotion is not something Chao is too accustomed to; she’s spent much of her career parachuting in for short stints in memorable projects, as her IMDb page will attest.
“I got a phobia of talk shows when Johnny Carson invited me back five times,” she says, reflecting on her breakout during the M*A*S*H and AfterMASH years. “I was in an acting class with people like Sean Penn, and it was considered really uncool to go on the Johnny Carson show. Then someone slipped a note to me while I was peeing and asked me to sign it. And I remember thinking, I don’t know if I like this.”
Double-fisting an oat milk latte and a green tea (it’s been a long day), Chao digs into the long arc of her career, from Star Trek and The Joy Luck Club to Freaky Friday.
Vanity Fair: You grew up in Southern California, and your parents owned a restaurant, right?
Rosalind Chao: In the mornings it was a pancake house, and it became a Chinese restaurant at night.
Was the food good?
The pancakes were amazing. The Chinese food was for the palette of somebody in Orange County. It was right outside of Disneyland and I never got to go. That’s probably why I love Disneyland so much now. My parents were immigrants who were working hard, and I was in the booth doing my homework and I’d see families come in all excited. Then when I was old enough I was waiting tables or washing dishes.
And talent scouts came to the restaurant?
Theater producers that my parents knew, and then an agent asked if I could audition for a commercial. My dad said so long as it doesn’t interfere with school, one time. Then I did many commercials, but small parts.
Your first T.V. credit is incredible, as James Hong’s daughter on Lucille Ball’s Here’s Lucy.
Lucille Ball was quite lovely to me. I used to sneak over to where they were doing her hair and hide, then watch the whole process.
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