Hong Chau (COM’01) attends the Oscar Nominees Luncheon February 13 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. Photo by Sthanlee B. Mirador/Sipa USA via AP Images

TV & Film

The Whale’s Hong Chau (COM’01) Is Nominated for an Oscar This Weekend

After years of hustle in Hollywood, alum has become one of this award season’s most talked-about actors

The way she tells it, actor Hong Chau wouldn’t even entertain the possibility of being nominated for an Oscar this year. Chau (COM’01)—who starred as Brendan Fraser’s caretaker in The Whale—had gotten her hopes up for an Academy Award nod once before, for her breakout 2017 role in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing. She received Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for best supporting actress, but she was shut out of the Oscars. 

So, this year, even after her Whale role had earned BAFTA, SAG, and Gotham noms, she stayed in bed with her toddler, dog, and husband as the 95th annual Academy Award nominations were announced. 

When her name was called as one of this year’s five best supporting actress nominees, she “couldn’t process it,” the 43-year-old actor told People magazine in a recent interview. “I was very surprised.” The Oscars will air Sunday, March 12, on ABC. 

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, The Whale is also up for best actor (Brendan Fraser) and best makeup and hairstyling awards. The film, adapted from the stage play by Samuel D. Hunter, tells the story of Charlie, an obese, lonely professor who struggles to reconnect with his estranged daughter. 

“The standout, alongside Fraser, is Chau,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter in its review of the film. “Her inability to intervene has left her helpless, enraged, exhausted and in visible pain. There’s also humor in Liz’s annoyance with Charlie’s innate positivity, which endures no matter how bad his circumstances become. In a movie that’s partly about the human instinct to care for other people, Chau breaks your heart.”

Chau has become one of this award season’s most talked-about actresses.

“After a few years of trying, you think, ‘Is it really worth it to try to dedicate my life to this?’” Chau told the New York Times in a recent Q&A. “But what kept me going was the delusional hope that I’d get to work on a cool, weird movie, because those were the movies that I liked. I just kept hoping that something would happen and, thankfully, it did.”

BU Beginnings

Chau was born in a refugee camp in Thailand to Vietnamese parents, and her family moved to New Orleans when she was still young. She attended BU, thanks to Pell Grants, where she helped friends with their student-produced films and enrolled in improv classes to overcome shyness. Those experiences steered her toward her major, in film, at the College of Communication. Her improv teacher encouraged her to audition for screen roles, and Chau took the advice. She kicked off her acting career with minor roles in TV shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and How I Met Your Mother. 

She returned home to New Orleans to shoot the HBO series Treme around 2011, thinking it would be her big break, but it took a few more years to land her first major film role, 2014’s Inherent Vice. Three years later she was cast opposite Matt Damon in the film Downsizing, and her portrayal of a Vietnamese amputee and political activist won her accolades—just no Oscar. Major projects followed, like HBO’s Big Little Lies and Watchmen and the 2022 dark comedy The Menu (she plays the menacing maître d’ opposite actor Ralph Fiennes). 

Then Chau’s agent sent her the script for The Whale. At first, she passed: she had an eight-week-old baby, and COVID was raging. She changed her mind when she heard The Whale’s team was very interested in seeing her audition. She sent them a tape and won the part.

Chau is “a force of nature: titanium backbone, suffers no fools, has a bear trap of a memory,” Fraser told the New York Times. “Everything is an embarrassment of riches for whoever’s editing her work because of how varied and interesting she is. And she can say more in between lines of dialogue, in the pauses and the silences, than I can with dialogue.”

Next, Chau can be seen in Asteroid City (directed by Wes Anderson) and the Netflix limited series The Night Agent. She will reunite with Damon in the just-announced The Instigators (which also stars Casey Affleck) for Apple Original Films. 

In an interview with A.Frame, the magazine of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Chau said she’s met the other nominees in her category—a “fulfilling” experience, one that makes her feel part of a community.

“A lot of times when you’re starting out as an actor, you’re just focused on not getting fired,” Chau said in the interview. “Most of my career has been just trying to get in the room, trying to get my foot in the door, and feeling like I hadn’t been invited yet. What’s fulfilling for me is feeling like the room is getting to be more familiar and feeling less like an outsider.”