The award-winning book Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu will be made into a 10-episode series by Hulu, reports Variety.
Jimmy O. Yang is set to star in the show and Taiki Waititi who won an Oscar for best adapted screenwriting in 2020 for JoJo Rabbit will direct.
Hulu originally announced it would move ahead with the series in November of 2020, but this is the first announcement of a cast or a director. The streaming network announced in 2020 that Yu would help adapt his National Book Award-winning novel for TV and that Dan Lin, Lindsey Liberatore, Elsie Choi, and Miura Kite will be working alongside Yu as executive producers.
Interior Chinatown follows the story of an Asian American actor as he contends with the difficulties of being typecast and stereotyped.
According to Deadline, Yang will play Willis Wu, a background actor on a cop show. Wu inadvertently stumbles onto a crime and suddenly finds himself at the center of attention.
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The book is known for its dark humor and unique storytelling, AV Club reports. Publisher Penquin Random House describes the book this way:
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?
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