By IT WAS IN the gym, of all places, that things became a little too much for Christopher Chung; the 38-year-old actor burst into tears. As you can probably guess, Chung’s misty-eyed dissolution in his traditional happy place wasn’t prompted by the prospect of his next quad-crippling deadlift. Instead, it was a text from his sister that underscored the emotional weight of his long-held ambition to be a bankable star and the realisation that, well, shit, after years of toil, he might just have made it.
“My sister sent me a message this morning,” says Chung, who’s been back in Australia on a whirlwind press trip to promote the Netflix remake of classic Aussie period drama My Brilliant Career. “Because she just watched the first episode and I was telling her I feel quite overwhelmed by everything that’s happening. And she was like, ‘I don't know why you’re surprised. We all knew this was going to happen’. And I just broke down because it just takes that one thing where you’re like, Fuck, so many people believed in me to get to this point. It does take a village and it’s all of that support that allows you to continue climbing that mountain. It’s been quite a homecoming.”
Indeed, it has. I first spoke to Chung four years ago on a call from his home in Mount Eliza on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, where he grew up. That day, he was wearing a muscle tee and sitting in a swivel chair in his parents’ study. He’d shot the first season of Apple spy drama Slow Horses alongside Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, among others, but it was yet to come out. His life was about to change but nobody, least of all Chung, could have foreseen by how much.
In the years since he’s been nominated for a BAFTA for his portrayal of the socially abrasive computer geek Roddy Ho; he’s attended the Emmys with the show’s luminous cast; and the day before our chat, it was announced that he’ll be starring in Netflix’s animated remake of Charlie vs the Chocolate Factory.
To further belabour the extent of Chung’s transformation, he arrives on set today dressed head to toe in Hermès, including a very fetching coral collared jacket and is joining Esquire in the studio to help showcase luxury Swiss watch brand Franck Muller’s range of timepieces.
Chung laughs at the suggestion that such a neat narrative summary makes him sound like your classic overnight success story. “I think I’ve spent so much of my career being a nobody,” he says, removing some possum poop from our table while joking that its presence indicates he really is back in Australia. “It’s just easier to lean into that. I very much separate my career from awards shows and red carpets and things like that. It’s not a real space that has anything to do with your acting. Disconnecting from that is a necessity, which I’ve started to see. It’s kind of my split personality. The work is the most important thing.”
Of course, while burgeoning fame can be whooshing in its intensity and potentially unmooring in its force, Chung is making a concerted effort to keep his feet firmly on the ground. “Everything in acting is just such a rollercoaster,” he says. “One minute you’re up, one minute you’re down. But it really does feel like, at the moment, there’s an upward trajectory, which is really nice because there are times when you think things are happening for you and then the rollercoaster just stops and you plateau. But recently it’s just been an upward climb.”
As someone of East Asian heritage who left Australia due to the dearth of roles for diverse actors, Chung has spent more time at the bottom of that rollercoaster than the top. Accordingly, he’s making the most of this moment, conscious of how important it could be for those who might follow him. “My biggest driving force in this was to make sure that I did my best work,” he says of his turn as Harry Beecham in the just-released My Brilliant Career. “I did as much as possible to make sure there wasn’t any room for someone to say, ‘This is why people like Chris don’t get parts’. It’s my responsibility to do my best work so that I continue to carve out that space, not just for myself, but for others, too.”
THE FIRST GLIMPSE of Harry Beecham in My Brilliant Career is through the eyes of the show’s protagonist, the free-spirited, headstrong, Sybylla, played by Philippa Northeast, who plainly likes what she sees. With his unbuttoned Henley shirts recalling Colin Firth’s Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, it’s clear that Chung’s Beecham is a full-blown heartthrob. For the actor, who is Malaysian Chinese on his dad’s side and Irish on his mother’s, that’s not a label he ever expected to be tagged with, at least for his onscreen performances.
“Oh, mate, I was so far from being a heartthrob when I was in my teen years,” he laughs, though, in his Hermès jacket and with his designer specs shielding his eyes from the morning sunshine, he looks every inch one. “If I showed you pictures, you would be like, How is that the same person? But it’s quite validating because I think I definitely spent a lot of my youth feeling undesired and less-than and didn’t have a girlfriend when I was in high school. It just wasn’t happening for me.”
He’s now married to Scottish actor Frances Mayli McCann, who’s understandably fuming at her husband’s transformation into a period pin-up. “There was an article that came out the other day that said ‘the internet’s new boyfriend’ or something like that,” he laughs. “I was like, Oh, wow. And she’s like, ‘Absolutely not’. She’s a great leveller. But it’s nice because I think what it [the role of Beecham] does for me in terms of my career, is open more doors and show studios and execs that I am marketable and bankable. A lot of what I’ve learned through my career so far is that the film and television business is a business.”
It’s not “show friends” I venture.
“It’s not ‘show friends’,” Chung agrees. “I say that all the time. It’s business.”
That business is an interesting beast to unpack. On one hand, it was ‘the business’ that meant that, as an East Asian actor, the only role Chung could get in Australia back in his younger days was as a drug dealer on an episode of Neighbours, because what else would an Asian be doing in white Australian suburbia back in the 2000s? It was the business that drove him to seek opportunities in the UK, where things were a little more inclusive. Chung landed a role on UK soap Waterloo Road back in 2013, hoping it would be his big break. The business said otherwise, although he would find more success on stage, with a notable turn in Romeo and Juliet at the prestigious Globe Theatre in London.
The Slow Horses role of Roddy Ho, whom Chung affectionately, perhaps a little derisively, refers to simply as “Ho”, shaped as a massive opportunity. Yet the role – playing a socially awkward, at times arrogant oddball – also represented the ceiling on the type of roles Chung thought he might be allowed to play on screen. That began to change in Series 5 of the acclaimed show, when Ho was elevated to a more prominent role and allowed to shed some of the loose-fitting gamer garb to reveal his muscular physique. Even so, he was no Harry Beecham.
I ask Chung if the distinction between Beecham and Ho shows the strides, not only that he’s made, but those the industry – the business – has managed in terms of the opportunities it affords actors from diverse backgrounds?
He nods but doesn’t answer straight away – it’s a subject he’s spent some time pondering. “I think sometimes it takes someone else to see that for you,” he ventures. “I was so astounded when the script for My Brilliant Career came to me because I was like, How is there an Australian period novel that has an East Asian protagonist that I don’t know about? Because I spent a lot of time trying to see my reflection on screen in this country when I was growing up. But then I realised that Liz Doran had made that adaptation and just asked the question, Why couldn’t Harry be of Chinese descent? This community definitely existed back in the 1900s. And it’s not colourblind casting; it’s just inclusive storytelling. I think when I say that, I wasn’t able to see myself [on screen] and my ceiling was always as a sidekick . . . sometimes it takes someone else to open the door for you to realise what’s possible for your career.”
It probably didn’t hurt that the late great Sam Neill, who played Beecham in Gillian Armstrong’s original 1979 masterpiece, signed off on Chung’s casting. “One of the formative films I watched as a kid was Jurassic Park,” laughs Chung. “I got a message from fucking Sam Neill from Jurassic Park. It’s really special because I was really hoping that he would be around to be able to watch the series. I know that he had given me his blessing and just kind of passed the torch in a way. So, yeah, I hope I did him proud.”
The knock-on effect of all this is that Chung now has the means to shape his career rather than have its contours crudely fashioned for him by the business. “Because of this, the dreams that I once had have changed so dramatically,” he says. “Learning creatively, through Slow Horses, how to use my voice and give my opinion and have it valued has been one of the greatest gifts because it’s allowed me to take an active part in making my own projects now.” He’s attached to upcoming productions in which he’ll executive-produce and star and has just optioned his first book to be adapted for the screen. “That’s something that, if you had asked me three or four years ago, wasn’t even on my radar.”
Some of these opportunities may mean these triumphant Australian homecomings become more of a regular thing. “I think my opportunities to come back to Australia for work are kind of where I would’ve wanted them to be 10 years ago,” he says. “It’s a really nice space to be in. It’s funny, because I spent so much of my youth, in my early twenties, running away from Australia. And now, in my mid-to-late thirties, I’m running back. I’m an Australian. It’s who I am. I had the birthday parties with the fairy bread and party pies and all those things that are kind of integral to who you become as a person.”
There was, of course, a darker side to that sun-dappled, rose-coloured childhood back on the ‘Insular Peninsula’. Chung was one of only four kids of East Asian descent in his school of 2000-odd kids. It wasn’t an easy time. And when he looked at his TV, either for inspiration or an escape, neither was there. But times change and so, perhaps, does the business.
If you’ve spent any time on the couch Netflix and chilling, you probably couldn’t help but notice the streamer’s commitment to inclusive casting. Multi-racial couples are a staple – though it’s perhaps fair to question the motivations that drive casting that, at times, can appear overly conscious, sometimes even conspicuous, in its diversity. Is it merely a reflection of the increasingly multicultural – sorry, Pauline – society in which we live? Or is the streamer, like the advertising industry, which jumped on board multi-racial casting (particularly bi-racial married couples) years ago, driven by dollars, machine-gun firing at demographics that are dictated by an all-seeing algorithm? Chung is up for the discussion but prefers to put the onus on himself, to be a player rather than a pawn.
“Whatever the motivations are for putting me in this part [Harry Beecham], whether it be tokenism – and I don’t think it is tokenism – a dollar thing or a woke thing, it’s my responsibility as the actor to just take that opportunity and make it into what I think it should be and what I want it to be, for my work, for representation and for moving the dial.”
SOME ACTORS PAINT in their spare time. Some play bass in shitty rock bands. Some run marathons. Chung works out, as he has done since he was a teenager, when body-dysmorphia issues saw him seek solace in the gym. But while sculpting his own body is a source of refuge, if there’s one thing that might prevent his bracing success from going to his head, it’s what he does with other people’s.
Chung continues to work as a PT, not because he needs to, but because he wants to. The act of serving others, helping them achieve their goals, is crucial, he believes, in preventing him from sliding into the type of solipsism that swallows actors whole.
“There's so much time as an actor that you spend looking at yourself and having people comment on you,” he says. “It’s a very selfish profession in many ways because you are the product that you are giving out to the world. To take a couple of hours a day where they [clients] are an external focus for you and they’re paying you their money for you to train them, is healthy. They don’t care that you went to the BAFTAS last night. They don't care that you were on a red carpet. They just want to talk about their kids, or they want to know how much they benched last week. It’s a complete disconnection from this other world, which is really positive for my mental health.”
He recalls the bleakness of the years before Slow Horses. The auditions that went nowhere. The phone that never rang. “There were many, many times throughout my career when my mental health really suffered because it was the thing that I had put all of my focus and attention on and continually wrapped myself up as to why it wasn’t happening for me,” he says. “It’s a really unhealthy space to be in. I think if I didn’t have personal training to be able to navigate this period of my life, I might be a very different individual right now. Because it can become so consuming and I never want to be consumed by that because I’ve seen it happen to people and it just turns them into horrible people.”
Similarly, as much as his career is taking off right now, Chung still has to audition for roles and continues to deal with rejection. It’s humbling and that, too, he finds healthy. He’s just better equipped to deal with it now.
“Obviously, as an actor, there’ve been disappointments in my career through these last five years,” he says. “There’ve been near-misses on shows or directors that I wanted to work with that haven’t gone my way. You think your CV is pushing you forward into that sphere and then you get a no and you’re like, Oh, I’m still back at that kind of base level. And I think it’s a really good, humbling moment for you to be told no when you feel like you’re flying because that’s the great equaliser. You can’t rest on your laurels.”
You certainly can’t when you work in the business Chung does. And you can’t, if, like Chung, you never let yourself forget what it was like before the going got good. He knows more highs and lows lie ahead, that the rollercoaster will continue to run. But he also knows that all of it is integral to forging what he now – ironically, for the most part, but poignantly, perhaps even a little tenderly – refers to as his own brilliant career.
Credits
Words Ben Jhoty
Photographer Michael Comninus
Styling and Editor in Chief Grant Pearce
Production Director Rebecca Moore
Fashion Assistant Kailee Waller
Videographer Jasper Karolewski
Photographer Michael Comninus
Digital Operator Lachy Starling
Photographer Assistant Bruno Stefani
