Interview: Vanessa Matsui on Acting, Anger and The Hot Zone

MIXED ASIAN MEDIA - JANUARY 14, 2022

By Melissa Slaughter

“You look like her,” Alex Chester (MAM’s founder) said to me at a screening of National Geographic’s series Hot Zone: Anthrax. She was talking about Vanessa Matsui, one of the stars of the five-part mini series that chronicles the 2001 anthrax attacks. In Hot Zone, Vanessa plays a scientist, a bioresearcher working for the U.S. government. With a quick search, I realized that I knew and loved Vanessa from two of my favorite Canadian TV shows: Letterkenny (she plays the Brodude Energy Drink Rep) and Schitt’s Creek (as the lawyer who buys the Blouse Barn in season 2). 

After catching up via Zoom, I can safely say that we don’t look alike. But I can also say that Vanessa Matsui is an absolute delight, a consummate creator, and someone I’d love to be friends with. She’s a life-long Canadian, and we got to talking about Canadian-Japanese internment, her dark comedy web series Ghost BFF, and her latest role in Hot Zone: Anthrax.

*The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

There’s also light spoilers for Ghost BFF and Hot Zone: Anthrax.

Were you a creative kid growing up, did you always want to be an actor? 

Apparently I did! My parents have lots of memories of me at a very young age always putting on plays and selling tickets to my family. And my aunts have all these stories that I used to put on these dance shows and needed everyone to come watch. I kind of knew from the get-go that I wanted to be an actor. But the writing and directing has been a bit more of a recent discovery.

Do you remember the first time you saw someone on stage or screen who looked like you, whether they were mixed or Asian?

Yes! The first time actually wasn't on stage or screen. I saw Lucy Liu on the cover of Jane Magazine. I kept it until I was 30. And I think, in hindsight, I had kept it for so long because it made such an impact on me. Like, “There's an Asian person on the cover of my favorite magazine?” I don't know if I understood at the time what that was, but it obviously meant something to me because that was the only copy of Jane that I had kept  through various moves of my life.

Now I'm just thinking about Charlie's Angels. That era of Lucy Liu.

Yeah, exactly. She was so cool. And she was kind of the only one.

You said that you pursued acting very early, but the writing and directing came later. At what point did you want to start creating your own work?

If I'm being totally honest about it, I had made a couple of short films in my 20s. I was really underemployed, and I was dating a cinematographer at the time. So it was just sort of easier to make things because he had a camera. When he had downtime, we could just shoot something over the weekend.

But when I first created Ghost BFF, (which is a short form series that I started making almost eight years ago) it was twofold. I felt that I would never be cast as the lead. I mean, it hadn't happened up until that point, so I wanted to show the industry that I could lead a show. At the same time, I almost lost my own best friend to suicide, I had another friend who died by suicide, and I had another friend who was in pretty intense electroshock therapy.

This was eight or nine years ago. So the conversation around mental health isn't what it is now. I just felt like there were all these young women suffering from depression, and nobody was really talking about it. So, I also wanted to help de-taboo suicide. I felt like if people could talk about it, it could potentially save lives.

You mentioned that a major part of creating Ghost BFF is about highlighting mental health for you. Is there any crossover between mental health and the creative process, and where is that crossover?

I think in a lot of ways, Ghost BFF really saved me. I started writing it when I got my first series regular in Canada. I moved down to L.A., we were picked up by The CW, and then the show got cancelled after two episodes.

What show was it?

It was called Seed. It was like literally on The CW for two episodes, and it was this really devastating moment. I was getting broke in L.A., underemployed. So I just started writing. It was this thing that’s been a really great touchstone for me. Every time that acting hasn't been there for me, my writing has been. It's been the thing that has actually kept me really sane through really challenging times in my life.

Yeah, that makes so much sense, especially when you're writing for yourself, because acting can be so much of someone else's work and writing is so personal.

Absolutely. And also, acting is random. You can be incredible in an audition and still not get the part. You can control your tape, or your audition, and hope that the right person sees it and that the right things happen. It's almost a miracle when you get cast. Whereas writing is something that you absolutely can control. You don't need anybody else.

I was reading interviews you did at the time of the first season of Ghost BFF, and one of the major themes you spoke about was how there's not enough women of color behind the scenes or leading or directing. I’ve been thinking a lot about how it often feels like, as women of color, we're constantly pushing a rock uphill. We’ve made some progress, but we're still pushing. So, I’m curious about what keeps you going? What keeps you wanting to stay in this industry? Because the other thing I got a lot out of the interviews I've heard with you is that you really do love this job, and you love this industry.

I think that there's a part of me that creates from a place of anger, like angry about an injustice. Like, de-tabooing suicide and opening up that conversation. And so I think that there's also a bit of that stubbornness to why I keep doing this to myself or why I keep going into it. I also feel like it’s important for more than one type of person to be creating media. If it’s just one type of person, there are a myriad of experiences that are left out of the narrative.

But even being mixed-race is really interesting because my whole acting career, it was always like, “She's not Asian enough, she's not white enough.” And it's like, I am not a white man's interpretation of what an Asian person is supposed to look like. I’ve fought against that my entire career. It's pretty astounding, but it’s like… you’re half Japanese as well? 

Yeah.

There are so many people of Japanese descent who are mixed-race in Canada because of World War Two. And there's a total unacknowledgment of the history in both Canada and America of what happened and why so many of us are mixed-race.

So, yeah, there is a reason why I'm half. No one on my Japanese side married another Japanese person. It was a law in Canada. You couldn't live within a certain kilometer radius of another Japanese person after the war.

Really? That's wild.

Internment and aftermath of internment in Canada was actually a lot worse than it was in America.

I read that you're writing a pilot based on your mom's experience and internment in Canada? 

I'm writing about my great-grandmother's journey from Hiroshima to Canada and then the second season, it would be all in internment. The first season is her trying to find her husband and establishing herself in the new world. But yeah, I would love to make it one day. It's very ambitious, but I feel like my mission is for people in this country to understand what happened to this generation of Japanese Canadians.

I got so many questions out specifically about internment, but I don't want to focus on that right now. I want to focus on you and your career. Tell me about this feature that you have just finished directing.

It's called The Night at the Paradise. It's a romantic drama, essentially about the story of a marriage told through three different couples at very different stages of the relationship. All set to the backdrop of the movie theater shuttering its doors. It stars one of my best friends, Liane Balaban, and Allan Hawco, Emma Ferreira and Ryan Allen. I'm so excited about it. You know, I'm an actor, so I have so much respect for actors and acting. I really wanted truthful performances, and I think that that was accomplished.

I feel like we've worked away all the way around to Hot Zone. Back to acting! Can you tell me about a Hot Zone: Anthrax?

So Hot Zone: Anthrax is an anthology series about the anthrax attacks post-9/11. I play Jody Hall, who was a scientist at USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases). I'm more of a composite character. She didn't exist in real life, but is based on a few characters who worked with and who were close friends with Bruce Ivins, who's played by Tony [Goldwyn]. Also, I really liked and appreciated that Daniel [Percival],the pilot director, started to tease out what it's like being a woman in that environment. I was the only one; there weren't that many.

What are you most excited for people to see in this season of Hot Zone?

I feel like there's this momentum to the series. Like the first episode, it's setting the scene, but it's just a ride afterwards. I had that experience even reading the scripts. I couldn't put them down. The cliffhanger at the end of each episode was just like, “Oh my God, know what's going to happen next?” I'm excited for people to watch it and enjoy the ride.

Well, this has been absolutely delightful. My favorite wrap up question, especially for mixed folks, is what’s your favorite food?

Honestly, pasta!

I noticed in both of your Twitter and Instagram bios: I love spaghetti. I will eat spaghetti. 

My nanny when I was little was Italian. And I was with her all the time. So I feel this real deep connection to Italian culture. In pre-COVID, our vacations were always in Italy. I love Italian food. I can eat spaghetti every day.

Check out Hot Zone: Anthrax on NatGeo and Hulu now. And follow Vanessa Matsui on Instagram (@msvanessamatsui) and Twitter (@VanessaMatsui)