‘Expats’ director Lulu Wang praises Filipinas Ruby Ruiz and Amelyn Pardenilla

LOS ANGELES, USA, March 7 ------ “Yes but as soon as I saw her (Ruby Ruiz), we all knew she was the one immediately. If you’ve seen the show, she brought all of that – all the warmth, all of the emotion, and I felt like that she was going to be the heart and soul of the expat community.” That’s Lulu Wang, creator and director of Expats, the series now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, answering my question about how she cast Filipina actress, Ruby, via her Zoom audition and the self-tape the latter sent. As the nanny in the Woo family (headed by Nicole Kidman and Brian Tee), Ruby is truly affecting as the series’ “heart and soul,” with her tender, subtle yet moving portrayal.

The actress, whose credits include films like Iska and Ma’Rosa and teleserye projects, auditioned for the Triangle of Sadness role that went to Dolly de Leon. Ruby has reportedly landed international roles as a result of the buzz about her performance in Expats. Ruby and another Pinay actress, Amelyn Pardenilla, and the main cast of Expats – Nicole (Margaret), who is also one of the miniseries’ producers, Saraya Blue (Hilary), Ji-young Soo, Brian, Tiana Gowen, Bodhi del Rosario (Filipino-Puerto Rican), and Jack Huston – are earning praise in the six-episode drama limited series which is also getting good reviews. I asked Lulu about Ruby and Amelyn during the Q&A in the recent Lulu Wang and Expats: Storytelling on a Large Canvas, part of Film Independent’s filmmaker conversation series, Directors Close-Up. Held at the Directors Guild of America, the panel, moderated by filmmaker Karyn Kusama (Yellowjackets, Girlfight) also featured Expats producer Dani Melia and production designer Yong Ok Lee. Set in 2014, as the Umbrella Movement protests rage in Hong Kong, Expats is based on Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2016 novel, The Expatriates. While it tackles the lives of several affluent expatriates in HK, Lulu made it a point to go deeper into the other perspective, that of the domestic workers, as reflected by the characters, Essie (Ruby) and Puri (Amelyn).

Lulu, who directed The Farewell (her sophomore feature), for which Awkwafina won the 2020 Golden Globe best actress-comedy or musical trophy, continued recounting how she cast Amelyn, a Cebuana singer who has been performing in HK’s top hotel bars for over two decades. “Amelyn was in Hong Kong. She auditioned in person. We said, we need to really be open and we’re not only looking for actors, let’s look at singers, let’s do like an open casting call to anybody who might be interested as a Filipina in Hong Kong because at that time, we only had the budget to cast locally and didn’t want to fly in another person internationally.” “So Amelyn came in and sang and she’s like, ‘Well, I’ve never acted.’ [I said,] ‘I don’t care, we’ll figure that out. Like your voice is so amazing.’” Lulu made excellent choices in Ruby and Amelyn, who are being cited by critics along with Nicole, Sarayu, and the rest of the cast. The Wrap raved, “By the end of the episode, Margaret and Hilary each find themselves in deeply vulnerable moments with Essie and Puri, respectively. ‘You’re a good friend,’ Hilary tells Puri. ‘You’re family,’ Margaret tells Essie.” “But what the devastating ending to the episode (five) — which is elevated by the subtle heartbreak in Pardenilla and Ruiz’s magnificent performances — reveals is this pseudo-bond that people like Margaret and Hilary create for themselves: to see their help as family, not only out of a sense of class guilt, but also because of the convenience that it brings them.”

Chicago Sun-Times, which also hailed Ruby’s performance as “magnificent,” wrote: “Expats contains some stunning twists and turns, but this is much more of a character study than a mystery.” “Nicole Kidman delivers searing work as Margaret, who is consumed with pain that is taking her to a place from where she might never return, and her work is matched by the performances of Sarayu Blue, Ji-young Yoo, Ruby Ruiz, Brian Tee, and Jack Huston.” “Each of these actors is given showcase moments in which their stories are front and center, and there’s never a false note in their respective performances. Expats is a richly layered, beautifully photographed, and profoundly affecting work.” Lulu explained how she worked with a cast with varying degrees of experience and yet elicited uniformly compelling performances. “We had a range of different types of actors,” she began. “We had like obviously Nicole and then we had Amelyn who plays Puri. She is a singer in Hong Kong, never acted before, and she was incredibly nervous.” “Ruby is from Manila and she’s well-known in the Philippines. She’s incredible and everything she does is immediately real and lived in.” “And then Sarayu and Brian have been around – veteran actors – but have never done roles of this size and this centered. Sarayu, in particular, does a lot of network comedy, and so she was like, ‘Oh, it’s a drama, like how big, what’s the size?’” “That was the biggest challenge – making sure everybody felt like they were in the same movie.”

Asked specifically how she made the cast comfortable despite their different backgrounds, Lulu answered, “I tried as much as I could to make them feel as valued as possible and tried to take the Hollywood-ness of it out and make them feel like equals as much as possible. Obviously, there was a lot of nerves.” “But we were all so close because we were there for so many months and so we would go to dinners together. We all spent a lot of time together and I think that helped.” “No, we didn’t have time to rehearse but I just told which characters, which people to spend time with, and then which ones not to,” Lulu replied about rehearsals before the filming in HK and then LA. “Like I kept Ji-young Yoo, who plays Mercy, and Nicole separate from each other because when they were shooting their scene, they were strangers. They meet a couple of times and that’s it, in the story, and yet they’re connected by this huge incident.”

Source: rappler.com