The fall of Saigon has been a commonly depicted subject across Western media, but the portrayal in the new HBO drama series “The Sympathizer” — in which panicked families attempt to flee Vietnam under heavy fire — barely features any American GI. And that’s no coincidence, cast members say.
Hoa Xuande, who plays the main character only known to viewers as “the Captain,” and Sandra Oh, who plays his love interest, the sharp Sofia Mori, said that the show is meant to challenge dominant perceptions of the war. It reframes the narrative to center the plight of Vietnamese people who lived through it, rather than on the sacrifices of American soldiers.
“Depictions of the evacuation, especially through the American media … is the GI soldiers pulling ‘helpless’ Vietnamese people to the helicopters,” Xuande said. “It’s that savior complex that Americans have … that they’re at the forefront of this story helping, Vietnamese people who couldn’t apparently help themselves.”
Oh added that the show, which premiered on Sunday on HBO and Max, serves as a “major shift of perspective — and a perspective that has always been but has been sorely missing for five decades.”
The seven-episode series, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, follows the Captain through his experiences as a spy for the North Vietnamese communists while serving in the South Vietnamese army as “the General”’s right-hand man.
His story — told through a series of flashbacks conjured by confessions he makes at a re-education camp in Vietnam — takes viewers through the end of the war to a new start in Los Angeles, where the Captain is tasked with keeping a close eye on the General’s activity.
Through it all, the Captain, who is the son of a French priest and a Vietnamese villager, grapples with his conflicting convictions, identities and sympathies. Oh’s character, a Japanese American feminist and advocate of…
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