Jess Hong on Playing Jin Cheng in Netflix's '3 Body Problem'
Jess Hong is, by her own admission, “not a science person.” She is much more at ease explaining the actions required to perform a Shakespearean death—“we had a fake, hard rubber dagger, [and] when Juliet stabs, I burst the blood bag with my other hand, so that you get the full spurting out of blood”—than she is talking particle physics.
But on 3 Body Problem, the sprawling Netflix sci-fi series about an impending alien invasion which promises to upend the lives of everyone on Earth, Hong plays Jin Cheng, a wildly-driven theoretical physicist and one of the “Oxford Five,” a group of college friends-slash-geniuses particularly affected by the looming alien threat. As Jin, Hong is responsible for convincingly delivering convoluted dialogue about getting a probe to one-percent light speed and other such complex endeavors. “I did want to get at least a foundational understanding [of the physics involved] so…I could communicate the intention,” she says. “Like, why are we doing this?”
So Hong did her homework: She read the Cixin Liu trilogy on which the series is based; she spoke with the show’s physicist consultant; she watched a Ted Talk by the physicist Brian Greene, “Is our universe the only universe?” and she started to wrap her head around the idea that although humans basically only perceive three dimensions, there are actually 10, plus time. “We're made up of all these molecules that aren't even technically connected. We're mostly empty space. If someone calls you an airhead, you can be like, ‘Bitch, we all are!’ We're all just held together by vibrations or energy.”
She and I are meeting in only two dimensions. The 29-year-old actress is Zooming in from her hotel room in London, wearing plaid pants and a fuzzy lavender sweater, two weeks before 3 Body Problem premieres. It is very possible that after the series lands on Netflix, Hong is about to be catapulted into a very different sort of universe from the one in which she has long resided, as a near-total unknown New Zealand native who’d never even been to London before she moved there for nine months to shoot this show.
In April 2021, Hong received an audition request through a casting agent for a project called “Untitled Benioff.” (As in David Benioff, one-half of the Game of Thrones showrunning team.) At the time, she was doing children’s theater, touring around Aotearoa. “Very rough and tumble,” she says of the operation: just three actors, “packing in and out of two schools per day.” Meanwhile, she submitted a self-tape for 3BP, performing “this really crazy, funny scene in some game world, and then this beautiful, nuanced, dramatic scene between two people. I was like, Is this really the same show? What the hell? Right off the bat, I knew there was some very cool duality or spectrum of storytelling in this.”
But her expectations stayed low. With self-tapes like that, she says, “You send it out into the ether and expect nothing back.” She attributes some of this attitude to being a Kiwi, the other-side-of-the-worldness of it all. “I think people in New Zealand tend to prioritize quality of life much more than ambition. It's not to say that we're not ambitious, it's just that I'm a Libra. I like to have some balance, and I think culturally we all like to have that balance.” Success in a place like Hollywood “does seem harder” from there. “It just seems further away geographically and metaphorically. But I like that.”
Before her audition, Hong had never heard of Liu’s books and was only dimly aware of the wattage of the people she was auditioning for: Benioff and D.B. Weiss, of Game of Thrones mega fame, and Alexander Woo, a True Blood producer. “I had only actually watched two seasons of Game of Thrones,” she says. “I think it helped… because if I was [a superfan], then I would be even more nervous than I was. And I was already pretty nervous to meet them.” After a four-month long process—more Zooms, chemistry reads—Hong landed the part. She had three weeks to pack up all her stuff, read as much of the books as she could manage (she knocked out the first one for plot and skimmed the third, where her character first appears) and move to London. To help get into character, she made a Spotify playlist for Jin with some very on-the-nose songs—Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” “My Universe” by BTS—whose title is a string of outer-space emoji.
“It was overwhelming for sure,” says Hong. She didn’t even know what it meant to be number one on the call sheet—the star of the show or film, essentially; on 3 Body Problem, it was Hong—until Weiss told her. (“He went, ‘Oh, you have a lot of shoot days,’” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s all right. I like to keep busy.’”)
Almost immediately, she was thrown “into three months of solid blue screen work,” trying to envision something epic and magnificent against a mostly-blank background. “I'm not going to lie, it's fucking weird,” she says. Fortunately for Hong, “because of how many eggs Netflix put in this basket” (read: the show was very expensive) there were actually real sets to work with while shooting these largely-CGI sequences. “You’d walk in one day and there’d be half a castle there,” she says. “And the next day, the castle’s taken down. They’ve completely covered the entire studio floor with sand.” The studio was illuminated with “300 light panels, which could be individually programmed so that you could have a beautiful sunset and you could adjust how much purple or orange you could make sun go across the sky,” she says. “You could see and feel and taste and hear a lot, actually. So it was almost like we were going into the game world ourselves.”
About that game world: In the series, Jin gets obsessed with playing a mysterious virtual reality game which makes her feel as if she is immersed in a universe that is always on the verge of collapse; her task is to crack the hidden code that destroys the planet and avert catastrophe. To a reasonable person this might seem like an unreasonable thing to do—for starters, the headset Jin wears to play has been found next to the bodies of freshly-dead scientists, and Jin is supposed to be on high alert for her own safety—but Jin’s curiosity is, to put it gently, unhinged. She can’t let the mystery go.
“Here's what I've learned about Jin Cheng. Once she finds something that she wants to solve, a problem or some mission, she must get to the end of it. She must find the answer. She must complete the mission, no matter what,” says Hong. “She's obsessive when it comes to new things or things she doesn't quite understand, because she's like, Wait, but I'm the smartest person in the room. I should understand everything.”
Hong imagines some of Jin’s determination is rooted in being a woman in a male-dominated space, someone who knows hers is a singular intellect. “She would be a very rare case of not just a woman—but a young woman—going to the top of her field.”
To unearth the humanity beneath Jin’s work-obsessed surface, Hong turned to the books, where the nuanced portrayals of Jin’s grief brought Hong to tears. It reminded Hong that, despite Jin’s ambition and professional prowess, “she's still this really soft human that feels everything to the core and lets herself feel everything.”
Hong wants this for herself, too: To hold on to her sense of humanity no matter what comes next. As nourishing as it is, her work as an actor “is not who I am as a human being,” she says. “I am also a daughter, I'm also a sister. I'm also the child of an immigrant.” She has no plans to relocate from her current residence, which she shares with a roommate, or to abandon Auckland, which she loves for its “really rich Pan-Asian arts community… I'm not wanting to leave [that] just yet.” She’s got another New Zealand project due out soon—the body horror Grafted, directed by Sasha Rainbow—whose premiere was, totally by chance, the same night as 3BP, just on the other side of the world. She doesn’t know yet if 3BP will get a second season (“my fingers and toes are crossed”).
3BP is, in part, a meditation on what it takes to survive. For Hong, her ability to take all of this as it comes, piece by piece, is crucial to her own endurance. “So even when I got a callback audition [for 3BP], I was like, It is great to make it this far. Wow, I'm so grateful for this experience. That's where it ends. That's the end of the line, but good to be here,” she says. “I think [that’s] an attitude that's necessary for survival.”
Photographer: Darrel Hunter | Stylist: Mui-Hai Chu | Hair: Nao Kawakami | Makeup: Kenny Leung | Location: The Langham, London
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