Don McKellar on his dizzying new spy series The Sympathizer

There's meta and then there's whatever is going on in The Sympathizer, a loopy, thorny and altogether audacious comedy about a Vietnamese double agent played by Hoa Xuande, who gets lost inside his own spy craft after the fall of Saigon. The new limited series, which also stars Robert Downey Jr. and Sandra Oh, adapts Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer winning novel about competing perspectives on the war, the storytelling to come from it and the role all that plays on Vietnamese identity.

The book's biracial protagonist, identified only as The Captain, is born to a Vietnamese mother and European father. To say his identity is split is an understatement. The Captain is a Vietcong operative embedded within the South's army. His mission continues post-war when he lives life as an American, juggling his loyalties to his former South Vietnamese commander, who is recreating the tensions from back home on California soil, and his handlers in Saigon. The Captain narrates these events, for different audiences at different times, in the show's story-within-a-story-but-it's-all-classified-and-maybe-a-canary-trap-anyway structure that mimics his own confused state.

"We wanted this dizzying feel, the multiplicity of voices competing to tell the story," says Canada's Don McKellar, who created the series alongside Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook. "That sounds scary, but we also feel that that's energizing. There's entertainment in that, because it's also about the pleasures of storytelling and how that sometimes subverts the truth."

It's not lost on McKellar that both he and Park (the director of Oldboy and Decision To Leave) are complicit in the whole multiplicity of voices thing, adding yet another level of postmodern metatext to the series (and it doesn't end there). "We thought of ourselves as the showrunner of two faces," says McKellar, "like The Captain in the book, this Eastern-Western pair that could carry the weight."

I'm speaking to McKellar (the director of Last Night) in a boardroom at Bell Media's headquarters. He's tickled that our interview is fitting the theme of his new Crave series, as if I'm interrogating him on behalf of a competing network, reporting my findings back to the CBC. The plot thickens: I'm also a film critic at CTV. "A double-agent," McKellar naturally observes.

We're discussing the outsider perspective that both he and Park bring to Nguyen's text, which doesn't at all feel out of bounds given this particular story. The Sympathizer is, after all, about all the outsiders influencing and even manipulating Vietnam's story.

The book serves as a response to all the narratives about the Vietnam War framed from an American lens. Think The Green Berets, Apocalypse Now or Platoon, the kind of movies that The Sympathizer star Hoa Xuande — who was born in Australia to Vietnamese refugees — tells me framed his understanding of his own history. "The trauma and the devastation that the GIs and soldiers that fought those wars, what they went through, is how I built my entire perspective of that war," says Xuande, in a separate conversation. "It's the only thing that I knew at the time."

"Not only are we trying to tell the other side of the story," Xuande continues, "but we're trying to tell the complexity of it, the experiences of the war and the post-war trauma."

"We want to show that that side also has two sides at minimum," adds McKellar. He's speaking to the deep fractures in the Vietnamese diaspora that Nguyen's novel explores, and the ways that colonizing forces continue to puppeteer the community long after the war, whether through re-education, politics, spy craft or even the movies.

In The Sympathizer, those colonizing forces are mostly played by Robert Downey Jr. Like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, Downey dons makeup, wigs and latex to give cartoonishly fun takes on a CIA agent, a politician, a professor and more. The connective tissue between everyone he plays is that they are all American patriarchal characters who position themselves as mentors to The Captain. 

McKellar explains how Chan-wook arrived at the decision to have one actor play them all: "There's a scene in the novel where they all come together in the steakhouse. We thought, 'Of course, they're all members of the same club.' They're all sort of complicit. They are, in many ways, ideologically opposed. One of them is a lefty filmmaker. One is a Republican congressman. But still, fundamentally, they are working together. It's this image of this sort of interdependent American establishment."

Seeing Downey in heavy makeup, with varying degrees of pigmentation, will inevitably give people flashbacks of Tropic Thunder. In the 2009 comedy, Downey played an Australian actor who wears Blackface while making a Vietnam War movie. Tropic Thunder scored Downey an Oscar nomination but hasn't aged well since. In a mid-season episode called The Hamlet, Downey plays the lefty filmmaker, Niko, who, like that Aussie in Tropic Thunder, takes things too far to when shooting a Vietnam War movie.

"I talked to him a little bit about that," says McKellar, suggesting that maybe those parallels worked against Downey taking this part. "I don't mind that there are resonances. I don't mind that because it is about images of culture, representation. It's part of our meta narrative too."

McKellar explains that Niko in the book is assumed to be modelled off Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now mode. But Downey instead took inspiration from his own father, an anti-establishment film director of that same era. His Niko is a sympathetic but domineering anti-war hippie who talks a big game about capturing the emotional truths in a movie about Vietnam that is yet again told from the American GIs perspective. The Captain is on the set as a Vietnamese consultant whose recommendations for authenticity and cultural sensitivity often go dismissed.

The episode's climax is the filming of a rape scene that hits too close to home for The Captain. Niko sees it as a tribute to the Vietnamese people, an acknowledgement of their suffering. The Captain sees it as trauma porn, exploiting his community's pain for the gratification of so-called bleeding heart Americans. 

"I weirdly genuinely understand both sides," says McKellar, who once again acknowledges his own complicity in the text. "I do understand what (Niko's) trying to say. 'Why are you mad at me? I'm showing how horribly you were abused.' But … it's raw."

"They were all lefty anti-war directors," says McKellar, referring to the types Niko represents. "But they — at least from our perspective now — got trapped in their own limited perspective. And of course, I do too."

McKellar is gesturing towards his own not so long-ago experience directing Through Black Spruce, an adaptation of the Joseph Boyden novel about a Cree woman searching for her missing sister. Boyden had since been scrutinized for claiming to be Indigenous without being claimed by any particular tribe, earning the label "Pretendian." McKellar's Through Black Spruce arrived in the wake of that controversy as well as critical debate about white filmmakers telling Indigenous stories, benefitting from their trauma, while native directors were struggling to get funding to tell their own stories. I reported on the subject in NOW Magazine, just months before Through Black Spruce premiered.

"I don't know what you're talking about," McKellar jokes. "I've forgotten it all."

Of course he knows exactly what I'm talking about. That experience informs some of his approach in The Sympathizer.

"I did make those parallels to the auteur telling the story of another culture," he says. "And I think you can feel that in the resultant script. At the same time, what was liberating was to have some irreverence about that and be able to have the ironic distance. Right from the beginning, I remember Chan-wook saying, 'don't be afraid of the irony. We're going for it. That's going to be our salvation.' And it is."

Stream The Sympathizer on Crave.