Acting in Asia?

Brickhouse

Brickhouse

Well-known member
My girlfriend is thinking of moving to Hong Kong to act. She's been told that there are better opportunities for Eurasian actors such as herself over there than here in Vancouver. Is this true? If so, can someone link me to some sort of evidence. I feel like Vancouver would be a better place to be for her.

Any information is helpful. Thanks!
 
Brickhouse said:
My girlfriend is thinking of moving to Hong Kong to act. She's been told that there are better opportunities for Eurasian actors such as herself over there than here in Vancouver. Is this true? If so, can someone link me to some sort of evidence. I feel like Vancouver would be a better place to be for her.

Any information is helpful. Thanks!
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If she can speak Chinese (cantonese or mandarin, either OK) and English, that's almost definitely true. If she can only speak one of those three languages, it's still probably true.

I don't have any way of citing evidence, but think about it: how many asians do you see in hollywood movies? TV shows? It's like the DVD commentary track of Dr. Horrible says, "nobody's asian in the movies." Eurasian or not, if she looks asian she's going to get "asian" parts, too. Yes, there are a couple exceptions, but if she's trying to be a star...quick, name three recent big budget films starring asians that were shot in Vancouver in ten seconds? Can you?

Because replace "Vancouver" with "Hong Kong" and I bet you could. It sucks to make decisions based on racism; on the other hand, it's kind of common sense. Of course the best market for an asian actress is going to be asia, assuming she speaks a language that works there.

(She would probably need to be at least conversational in Mandarin or Cantonese to take full advantage though, is she?)
 
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She speaks English and some French. She's only half Chinese, a quarter Indonesian and a quarter Russian.
 
Brickhouse said:
She speaks English and some French. She's only half Chinese, a quarter Indonesian and a quarter Russian.
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To get lots of roles, she'd probably have to learn at least some Cantonese or Mandarin (French is useless). But honestly, I probably see more asian girls speaking English in Chinese movies than I do in American (or Canadian) ones. And they do tend to be pretty relaxed about what language you speak because everything is subtitled anyway (See, for example, Stephen Chow's movies, which are often half Mandarin and half Cantonese, and feature conversations where one character is speaking one language while the other speaks the other*). Hong Kong as a city is quite English friendly, since it was owned by the Brits for a century. I'm not an expert by any stretch, but I suspect if nothing else it might be worth a trip out there for a couple months to test the waters....

(and if she's going to pick a language to study, pick Mandarin!)

*Mandarin and Cantonese are linguistically related but mutually unintelligible languages. A Mandarin speaker understands Cantonese about as well as you understand Italian (unless you've studied it).
 
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