“I grew up in a small town in Washington state where they weren’t that many Asian Americans,” Chen says. “I vividly remember lying in bed at night and thinking, ‘Yeah when I’m 16 I’m going to be blonde and have blue eyes’ because I didn’t understand how any of that worked. I’ve grown into being somebody who loves being Chinese and being Asian American and all the community that comes with that. But there’s a kernel of that scared and vulnerable girl in me.”
Due to the Slanted‘s transformational premise, Chen occupies the lead role for only a little over half of the film’s running time before giving way to Grace as the “new” Jo. An ascendant young performer with major roles in The Haunting of Hill House, I, Tonya, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Grace worked closely with Chen to establish consistency in their character.
“It was definitely an interesting breakdown of a character to get. I was like ‘Who? You want me to do what?’” Grace says. “I could never understand what it’s like to be this character but I could deeply understand what it’s like to be a very insecure teenager. I really connected with that when reading it. [Chen and I] came up with a bunch of mannerisms to tie the two characters together. We wanted to make sure it translated.”
“Mckenna’s an ABG, can’t you tell?” Chen jokes of her counterpart, before clarifying for a baffled interviewer: “Asian Baby Girl!”
If the concept of two actresses playing the same role in a comedy with elements of body horror and social commentary sounds familiar, it’s probably because another movie in that remarkably targeted genre just found major success on the awards show circuit: The Substance.
“It was totally on purpose,” Wang jokes of timing the release of her film to the Demi Moore/Margaret Qualley project. “That’s been really great. From the get-go I wanted the movie to be satire and I wanted her face to fall apart. It’s definitely been a journey to combine these different genres from family drama to teen stuff with the comedy and the body-horror.”
