In today’s blog post, we asked actor Elizabeth Sung about playing Anna Cheung, one of film’s the central characters.
In what ways do you connect to Anna as a character?
My late mother, who was beautiful, intelligent and amazingly talented, came from a very humble family. Instead of completing her elementary school, she had to quit in order to provide for her family. This became a very sensitive and shameful topic for her, even though all of her children, later on, had the chance to get their college education. I do not have to reach far to understand Anna’s emotional journey, her sense of shame about her past and her relentless effort to want to recreate and perfect her identity.
What do you anticipate to be your biggest challenge as an actor in preparing for this role?
To identify and embrace all of Anna’s flaws and to portray them with love, truth and honesty, and without judgement. To be able to show that, in order to love fully, one has to start from loving oneself.
Without giving anything away, what aspects of the story or the character are you most excited about?
I am excited to get under the skin of Anna, stripping away her perfectionist driven, self-sufficient façade – to get to who she is – an aging vulnerable and lonely woman who so desperately wants to reconnect with her estranged daughter and who has to learn to accept herself in order to be able to fall in love again.