‘Interior Chinatown’ Star Chloe Bennet on Her Theories About That Cliffhanger Ending and Being Told She Doesn’t Look ‘Asian Enough’

variety.com:

Max Gao SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains major spoilers from “Interior Chinatown,” now streaming on Hulu.

Chloe Bennet knows what it is like to straddle two worlds — both in life and on television. For seven seasons, the Chinese American actor starred as Daisy Johnson/Quake in ABC’s “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” a long-running, procedural-esque show that followed the lives of special agents in a world of superheroes.

Having spent the majority of her 20s working on “S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Bennet learned to define parts of her own life through playing a character — so much so that she feels like she was essentially raised in the procedural genre.

So, when she first read Charles Yu’s National Book Award-winning novel “Interior Chinatown” — which follows the life of a Chinese American actor who has always felt like a background player in his own life until his being witness to a crime in Chinatown reveals that he is actually a bit player in a much larger story — Bennet, whose father is Chinese and whose mother is white, began to recognize parts of her own experience in Hollywood. “Charlie is such a brilliant writer — and this is how he is in real life as well — but he is so able to capture these very specific and nuanced feelings about racial identity, even for me being a woman on a TV show,” Bennet tells Variety of “Interior Chinatown,” which explores tropes and archetypes that often relegate Asian characters to the background. “There’s so many ways that he was able to express these nuanced emotions and feelings that I’ve had in my whole life, and it felt like he was able to just string them all together in this book.