"The most important thing was making sure she came across as a human being. We can all have many different sides, some that ask more of you in terms of identity than others. For me, I didn’t want her accent or her disability to be the most interesting things about her, but I did look into some real life female activists and took a lot of inspiration from those amazing women. I was also inspired by Flannery O’Connor; I grew up in Louisiana and you would always see pictures of her with her canes, as she suffered from Lupus, but continued doing amazing work."

“…When you have that sort of background, being an actor in Hollywood is like the wildest, most far-fetched occupation that you can think of and I kind of fell into acting because I was initially interested in writing when I was younger and I went to college initially thinking that I was gonna major in creative writing and that didn’t work out. I ended up studying film instead because I thought it was also another form of storytelling…”

“…as an actor, I never am attracted to just playing a physicality or a bit – just having a disability or an accent or something isn’t attractive to be because it can kind of be like a party trick. When you’re dealing with a character who’s disabled, that’s somebody’s life. That’s somebody’s reality, so you need to treat it with a lot of respect and profundity and not to turn it in to a gimmick, like a ‘bit’...”

“… it is a character that is potentially provocative, but I don’t think that it was intended that way. That comes in with whatever baggage the audience brings in to the movie-viewing experience… There have been so many other movies where an Asian character has been under-served or just been sort of a background character…”