FATHER FIGURE

Mulan’s Tzi Ma: After 120-Plus Roles, a Beloved Actor’s Career Surges

Ma holds a special place in the Asian American acting community. He talks candidly with V.F. about his unlikely path and the peers who deserved more recognition: “Look at Parasite—all these Oscars, but not one for acting? Hello? Awkwafina? Come on, man.”

By Rebecca Sun

September 4, 2020

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By Emma McIntyre/Getty Images.

Tzi Ma remembers what the job was like before, back when Asian-centered projects in Hollywood were not just sporadic but nonexistent, and the best that most Asian American actors could hope for were occasional guest spots on TV.

“I felt for the writers,” says the Mulan star, 58, of the countless hackneyed scripts he’s read. “They’re in the room, and all of a sudden, the showrunner goes, ‘Let’s do an Asian episode.’ If you don’t know any [Asians], what are you going to do? Go to Blockbuster and grab all the Asian-themed stuff and throw it together.”

Tzi Ma in Mulan. Courtesy of Disney.

Ma could have taken whatever pickings were offered, no matter how slim, or opted out of the system altogether, retreating to his roots in the more liberating experimental-theater scene. Instead, he approached every potential gig with a conscientious eye and a genuine desire to help, not to mention a New Yorker’s way with words. “I’d look at a script and go, ‘Okay, can we salvage this puppy and see if this turkey will fly?’” he says. “I knew [the writers] were between a rock and a hard place, so if I could offer suggestions, I would. The trick is to learn how.”

The boldness to speak up, and the savvy to do it gracefully, is what Ma credits for his longevity in an industry that has not placed much value on character actors of Asian descent. Ma has worked steadily in his chosen profession for more than 40 years, popping up as a “Hey, it’s that guy!” sort of way in more than 70 series and 40 movies, often whenever a story called for the presence of a bureaucrat from an autocratic Asian country (even within this niche, Ma’s range extends from the fatherly consul whose daughter is kidnapped in Rush Hour to the vengeful ex-diplomat Cheng Zhi in 24).

“I feel like he’s too young to call him the Godfather, but that’s kind of the presence,” says Lulu Wang, who directed Ma in her acclaimed film The Farewell last year. “He is a mentor. He is incredibly involved in the community. [Even] on set, he shows up when he doesn’t have to. He does that to really create this level of visibility and unity, and I think that’s tremendously important. I don’t think there’s a single Asian American actor who doesn’t know who Tzi Ma is—even if they’re really, really young and they’re not as familiar with the older generation. Everybody knows who he is.”

Ma grew up in Staten Island, New York, during the Vietnam War, which was not a welcoming time for an adolescent who had immigrated from Hong Kong. Acting in school plays became his means of survival. “All of a sudden, you’re a local celebrity,” says Ma. “The drama club kind of saved my ass a little bit on the racism front…. The first school play I did, Annie Get Your Gun, I played Buffalo Bill. After that, it was like, ‘He played Buffalo Bill, how hard could it be to like this guy?’”

Ma in The Farewell and Tigertail. From the Everett Collection.

Like Wang, the director Alan Yang talks about Ma with something like reverence. “I can’t imagine what he’s gone through as an actor,” says the filmmaker, whose Netflix feature Tigertail in April was Ma’s first time atop a call sheet. “Think about when Tzi was 25 and trying to act in the ’80s. Think about how he’s been around all this time, getting chops, getting reps under his belt.”

Progress was slow for years, not just for Ma himself but for his fellow Asian American actors. “It’s always been that two-step tango, one step back, flavor of the month for the longest time. Finally I feel we’re on solid ground,” says Ma, adding that it isn’t just the business that has changed, but also the Asian American audience itself. “The community is understanding what we’re doing now. We always had this kind of paradox: ‘Yeah, we like these [entertainers], but my kid’s going to be a doctor.’ Now they’re more supportive and more vocal. I hear [nonindustry] friends saying, ‘The box office needs to be amazing the first weekend.’ They’re beginning to understand how representation changes the dialogue.”

The growing interest in Asian-centered stories, along with the rise in Asian American auteurs plumbing their own backgrounds in their work, has turned Ma into the go-to paternal muse. Wang’s semi-autobiographical family dramedy, The Farewell, earned the actor—already a respected fixture in Asian American indie cinema—a wider (and, yes, whiter) audience. His role as the beloved father who inspires a young woman to become a warrior in Mulan is his highest-profile role yet.

“Actors’ careers are made by the roles that they’re given, that are written for them,” says Wang. “The unfortunate thing for Asian American actors is so often, because people haven’t seen it, they don’t envision it. They’re like, ‘I’ve written this for Bill Murray, so we’re going to go look for somebody who looks like Bill Murray.’ Well, why not imagine Tzi?… His face is so expressive. He’s able to do so much with so little, and there’s humor in his eyes as well as pathos. I refer to him as the Asian Bill Murray, because he can make you laugh just by sitting there. Just because you haven’t seen him in a certain type of role in the past, doesn’t mean that you can’t be the one to create that for him. That’s the challenge still and the thing that we can push toward: Envisioning people of color who haven’t had roles that are as dynamic, and creating it for them.”

Ma in Arrival and 24.From the Everett Collection.

As representation has come in the last couple of years, Ma knows American culture as a whole can still get stuck in that old two-step tango. In early spring, as COVID-19 fears began to enter the American consciousness, he was racially harassed in a Whole Foods parking lot near his Pasadena home, with a man yelling “You should be quarantined” at him before driving off. “You feel that there’s all this acceptance, and then all of a sudden it rebounds,” says Ma. “It’s a very delicate racial ecosystem we have, and it seems like we as a nation can’t shake [our prejudices].”

But the actor still talks animatedly about the transformative possibilities of art and of his hope that his peers will be appreciated even more universally. “Now that we have these great projects coming up, the next thing we have to focus on is getting the acting recognitions in these projects,” he says. “Look at Parasite—all these Oscars, [but] not one for acting? Hello? Awkwafina? Come on, man. For some reason, it’s as if the picture is out there on its own. Look at The Last Emperor. John Lone was robbed. [Playing a character] from teenager to 80? He was robbed! Joan Chen, the opium-addicted queen? Give me a break, robbed! Pat Morita should have won [when he received an Oscar nomination for The Karate Kid]. All of these wonderful performances, and for some reason, we always get overlooked. We need to say, ‘Listen, the film didn’t go on by itself.’ It’s not Nat Geo.”

Ma has never forgotten his first school play, and how it humanized him in the eyes of his classmates. “In a sense, I keep on thinking back to that time…. I’ve always had the idea that what we do [as artists] is noble, that we have the ability to change perception millions at a time. What can we do to recreate this trigger point? Where can we find this threshold? It probably doesn’t exist, but one can dream, right?”