Nowadays, Asian moms are the main character. The film “From Embers” stars Kara Wang (“Top Gun: Maverick”) as not only an Asian mom named Lily, but a recent widow and now the only guardian of her autistic son. Following the death of her husband Ron, Lily finds her life upended, needing to find a source of income, having to downsize, and moving to a new neighborhood, all while working to solve the mystery of her husband’s sudden and tragic death.
I talked to Wang about working on the independent film, portrayals of Asian mothers, and representations of grief.
Despite having been in big blockbuster productions prior, having lunch with award-winning Chinese American Kate Bohan, the writer and director of the film, got Wang excited about the role. “It was very refreshing to be able to talk about a leading role that had so much that I could dig my teeth into,” she says, noting that sometimes with “indie films, [you] never know what you’re gonna get.”
While most independent films can be “guerilla films” with tiny budgets, skeleton crews, and limited props, Wang also recognizes that as an actor, independent films push the craft and oftentimes “actors do their best work.”
“[In independent films,] you get the opportunity to showcase so many different colors that maybe you haven’t gotten the opportunity to before. For me, I’ve had the opportunity to work on big blockbusters like ‘Top Gun,’ where I was shooting for eight months and I got to go through flight training and all of these very, very cool things to support that role,” she reflects. “The indie experience is just very freeing, I would say. The main thing that drew me to the project was the character and the challenge of being able to play a character that’s so different than who I am in real life.”
Portraying a Complex Asian Mother in “From Embers”
Even though the past few years have brought many Asian women to the forefront, for Wang,
Lily was a complex and…
Read the full article here
