Chase Sui Wonders on Improv with Seth Rogen, Overcoming Shyness and Balancing Hollywood's Highs

In the pilot episode of *The Studio*, Chase Sui Wonders, as an ambitious assistant named Quinn, tells her boss, played by Seth Rogen, that she came to Hollywood 30 years too late. The comedy follows an executive team at a movie studio as they try to juggle corporate demands with creative ambitions — and create a *Barbie*-like blockbuster — and when Sui Wonders heard about it, she was desperate to audition.
After sending in a self-tape, she joined a video call with the producers, including Rogen. “We did the scene a couple of times, and then Seth was like, ‘Okay, now let's just toss out the script. Let's just you and me riff.’ I was so terrified. But then we just hopped right into the riff zone and bounced the scene around, and he didn't stop, so I didn't stop. And then, like, 10 minutes later, he was, like, ‘amazing.’ And then he just lit a joint in the Zoom call.”

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Sui Wonders had no idea if she’d gotten the part. But was thankful her character in the show was meant to be a nervous wreck. “I went method on it,” she says. “This thing used to happen to me early on in auditions where my palms would start to seize up and it happened in this callback. I’m so glad it wasn't in person, because outside of the Zoom, my hands were all clenched up and I was sweating and shaking. Afterwards, I closed my laptop, and I was like, ‘What the fuck just happened?’”

When we speak, Sui Wonders is at her sun-filled home in New York City, makeup-free with a blue sweater on and her hair pulled back. The Studio is midway through its first season and she’s brilliant in it, holding her own amid a cast that includes comedy veterans such as Catherine O'Hara and Kathryn Hahn and cameos from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron and Zoë Kravitz.

There’s always going to be a certain kind of nostalgia for Old Hollywood, but unlike her character, Sui Wonders feels grateful to be working in the industry today. “People now are nostalgic for this time in the ‘80s when everyone was doing a bunch of coke and being politically incorrect and people were getting abused on set left and right,” she says. “There was this crazy, manic energy people romanticise now — but I wouldn't want to be a woman on a set in the '80s. That sounds like hell.” She lists recent hits like Anora and The Substance – low-budget indie films that had huge commercial success. “In 20 years, people are going to be like, you know, back in our day, everyone was going to movies, to see superhero movies, and then Barbie came out, and it was awesome. And Christopher Nolan could make a big-budget movie that everyone went to see. There's a world in which Anora would be a sleeper hit, and then years later, people will be like, ‘Oh my God, this movie, it’s a cult classic.’ But now it's mainstream. And I mean, if that's not a sign of something good in the waters, I don't know what is.”

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“But if we’re being real, there are more female directors than there ever were, and more women in front of the camera, and more women of colour and people who look different. I think we’d be lying if we said this isn’t the best time ever to be a marginalised person working in this industry.”

Still, she knows Hollywood’s not perfect and that optimism isn't exactly the default setting in an industry built on cynicism. “There’s a saying that pessimists look really smart, but optimists make money,” she continues. “You can sound smart when you’re a pessimist and you have all these critiques about the industry. But if we’re being real, there are more female directors than there ever were, and more women in front of the camera, and more women of colour and people who look different. I think we’d be lying if we said this isn’t the best time ever to be a marginalised person working in this industry.”

It’s hard to imagine now, but when Sui Wonders was a child growing up in Detroit, she was “painfully” shy. So much so that, reflecting, she calls her condition “selective mutism” — she could barely speak to anyone outside of her family. “It was never really acknowledged at the time,” she notes. “I mean, I grew up in the Midwest, and my dad's Asian. So, the Asian repression mixed with the Midwest repression was twofold. But then my mum was like, ‘You are going to audition for the local community production of The Wizard of Oz.’” Sui Wonders braided her hair like Dorothy and was determined to speak. “I got on stage… and nothing. They were like, ‘Could you sing us a song?’ Nothing. ‘What about Happy Birthday?’ Still nothing. Then they started playing Happy Birthday on the piano and I took the chair all the way to the back of the room, facing the wall, and in the tiniest decibel, sang Happy Birthday to myself.”

I tell her how sad that sounds.

“Yeah, it’s really sad in retrospect. But now I’m not shy at all. I don’t know what happened—but something in there was formative. Now I talk so much.”

Watching movies and reciting the lines to her siblings helped Sui Wonders come out of her shell. She loved comedy, but was also obsessed with Catcher in the Rye. “All these misanthropic movies and books. I grew up in a very white suburb, and I was kind of teased for being weird and being different and being into weird hobbies. I was always the odd one out, and I kind of leaned into that personality and romanticised my life. I had a lot of angst, and I would write about it, and my siblings and I would make movies about it.”

“It's easy to get lost in the sauce because there are so many aspects of this industry that are so intoxicating. And if you are in these heightened scenarios for a long enough time, you start to get desensitised to everything else.”

After writing a college essay about those homemade movies, Sui Wonders was accepted into Harvard, where she studied film production and began to envision herself as a screenwriter, while contributing comedy to the Harvard Lampoon. It was there she discovered directors like John Cassavetes, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Paolo Sorrentino. “All of the greats.” Upon graduating, she got representation as a writer and spent some time trying (and failing) to sell scripts. But in 2020, at 23, she unexpectedly landed a small role in Sofia Coppola’s Bill Murray comedy On the Rocks. A year later, she was cast in HBO’s Gen Z ensemble high school drama Generations, before appearing in A24’s 2022 slasher romp Bodies Bodies Bodies. Now, she’s gearing up to lead Sony’s big-budget reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer and star in Gregg Araki’s new film I Want Your Sex, alongside Olivia Wilde (“a goddess”) and Charli xcx (who Sui Wonders didn’t have scenes with, but is sure “killed it”).

Now, life consists of artist access to Coachella, alongside model Gabbriette and actress Madelyn Cline, attending awards ceremonies, starring in Rodarte campaigns, and sitting front row at fashion week for Miu Miu and Thom Browne. But despite the glamour, Sui Wonders is hyper-aware of how destabilising Hollywood can be. “It's easy to get lost in the sauce because there are so many aspects of this industry that are so intoxicating,” she says. “And if you are in these heightened scenarios for a long enough time, you start to get desensitised to everything else. There are lots of ways things and people in this industry can play tricks on your receptors and your endorphins. The oxytocin release is really crazy. There are all these highs that you can start to become accustomed to and I think that can be really corrosive when suddenly it’s paired with one bad day or one weird interaction, and then suddenly your sense of reality is totally warped.” She’s constantly grounded by her family and friends – a lot of whom don’t work in the industry. But also the ones who do.

“I have a small army of people in the industry who I love and trust. We can be very real with each other. There's no sense of competition. Everyone just wants each other to crush and do well, and that is really nice. And I have all my friends from high school and college still, and that is so nice to come back to, because they are constantly humbling me.”

“Writing is a nice balance to acting, where you have no control and are there to serve someone else’s story. That has its own thrill. But writing—you’re in the driver’s seat, which is so fun.”

Sui Wonders often uses costume as an entry point into character and will pull inspiration from her life, or that of the people around her. “For The Studio, I talked a lot to my best friend, Hannah, who is the assistant to a director, about being young and hungry and wanting it all now. Being impatient, but also needing to earn your stripes. I watched a lot of movies and read some old, pretentious film essays I wrote in college, too.”

She loves making comedy and the way the genre can be used to play with human psychology. “It’s so much harder than drama because you have to cry, but you have to cry in a funny way. And it has to not be that sad, but also, it has to be believable. You have to be super dialed into the levels of reacting. It's such a fun challenge because you need a base of dramatic acting, and then you have to add all these flourishes that make it into something funny.”

That fascination with the emotional undercurrents of a scene — what's really going on beneath the jokes — carries over into how she chooses her roles. “I’ve always been attracted to characters who are ‘a little off kilter’ and slightly deviate from the norm,” she adds. “Just generally, women who are one degree off. I mean, Gena Rowlands is the GOAT when it comes to crazy characters and women on the brink.”

Throughout all her on-screen success, Sui Wonders has continued writing – mostly from home “huddled over a computer with my neck is cramping for 12 hours”, but also sometimes from bookshops like Stories in Echo Park when she’s visiting L.A. She’s co-directed fashion campaign films for brands like Anna Sui and Marc Jacobs and previously wrote, directed, and starred in the short film WAKE for Vogue China. “Writing is a nice balance to acting, where you have no control and are there to serve someone else’s story. That has its own thrill. But writing—you’re in the driver’s seat, which is so fun.”

It’s that sense of control, and purpose, that keeps Sui Wonders grounded. Whether she’s writing in solitary or improvising alongside comedy icons, it all comes back to the people and the process. “Because some of this stuff really doesn't matter. At the end of the day, the best part is making something good with good people. The rest is just the sprinkles on top.”

Chase Sui Wonders on Improv with Seth Rogen, Overcoming Shyness and Balancing Hollywood's Highs

“It's easy to get lost in the sauce because there are so many aspects of this industry that are so intoxicating. And if you are in these heightened scenarios for a long enough time, you start to get desensitised to everything else.”

“Writing is a nice balance to acting, where you have no control and are there to serve someone else’s story. That has its own thrill. But writing—you’re in the driver’s seat, which is so fun.”

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