The creators of 3 Body Problem recently revealed how actress Zine Tseng got the part. And it wasn’t easy.
In an interview with Deadline, D.B. Weiss, David Benioff, and Alexander Woo talked about what impressed them about the actress, specifically her withstood brutal audition. They were all on a panel for the Contenders TV event on Sunday, where all the info came to light.
Benioff mentioned Benedict Wong and John Bradley as choices they wanted in the series. However, Tseng had to audition—and it wasn’t in person. Nope. She had to audition via international Zoom, and there was a bad connection. We’re guessing the type that kept breaking up, freezing, scratchy audio — you name it.
However, that didn’t dissuade her. She persisted forward and got through the glitches, which would probably break most actors in such a difficult situation.
Benioff said, “I think a lot of people would have just been broken by that. How do you maintain that intensity again and again?”
But she must have done well because she landed the part of young Ye Wenjie.
About Ye Wenjie
Tseng’s character is, during China’s cultural revolution, an astrophysicist who was shaped and disillusioned by her experiences, NBC states during an interview with the star. Additionally, her father is a physicist who was killed. So, she became part of the Chinese government’s secret project. The project consisted of contacting extraterrestrials.
Ye Wenjie is also played by Rosalind Chao, who depicts the older character version.
The show 3 Body Problems is about scientists worldwide who discover a virtual reality video game that leads them to an intergalactic species. The story moves from the past to the present, hence the two versions of Wenjie.
Beyond the audition, the Deadline panel discussed what creative challenges they’re facing for Season 2 of the series.
“This kind of eases you into the world of the story but the story gets really wild in the best possible way,” Weiss said. “With something that’s that wild, there are a lot of choices to be made and a lot of things to be figured out. We’ve been putting our heads together to figuring them out recently, especially the past couple of months.”
Regarding dictating Cixin Liu’s books, on which the series is based, Woo said, “Out of necessity, we needed to be the cast mostly speaking English. The Chinese flashbacks were very much intact. It afforded us an opportunity to tell a very global story. Humanity either comes together or doesn’t come together to face an existential threat.”
They also discussed the scientific aspects of the Netflix series.
Weiss said, “You don’t want people to be pushing pause and hitting Wikipedia every five minutes. You could do the version of that that makes people do that but it pulls people out of it. In the book, he’s explaining all this stuff to you anyway in writing. It was challenging. That was ultimately what drew us to the project to begin with.”
The motto of the story is: If you’re an actor and you have an auction on Zoom—bad connection or not—keep going and keep the momentum up. You might land a role like Zine Tseng for 3 Body Problem.
Follow Us
Subscribe
