'The Interview': Sandra Oh Knows What's Great About Middle Age

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From the New York Times, this is the interview.

I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro.

One of the most freeing parts of being a woman in middle-age is letting go of all the stuff that weighed you down earlier in your life.

By this point, we've achieved quite a bit, we've learned quite a bit about who we are, and we've also learned quite a bit about ignoring those who would try and limit us.

We're kind of whittling ourselves down to what matters.

Actor Sandra Oh knows all about that journey.

She's best known for the 10 seasons she spent on Grey's Anatomy playing the career-defining role of Dr.

Christina Yang.

After she left the show, she then played Eve Pilastri in Killing Eve, an intelligence operative in the UK tasked with tracking an elusive and entrancing female assassin.

And this summer, she'll be on stage in Shakespeare in the Park in New York City.

She's playing Olivia in 12th Night.

None of those characters were originally written written to be played by an Asian woman, but O has broken barriers and paved the way for many of the Asian actors who have followed.

Even as she says, now in her 50s, she's still processing what it took to get there.

As we do regularly on the show, I sat down with O twice.

The first time was in front of a live audience at the Tribeca Festival.

The second was a few days later, just the two of us.

We talked about her career, aging, DEI, and for the first time publicly, she read from her personal diaries about key moments in her life and how she looks back on them now.

Here's my conversation with Sandra O.

This is exciting.

This is how we were on the couch about stage.

We just had a conversation on the couch, which was, we went deep fast.

I was reading about you, of course, course, in advance of this conversation, and I came across this really great quote from 2019.

You were one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people.

Chondra Rhimes, who of course is the creator of Gray's Anatomy, wrote your entry and she said, and I'm quoting here, Sandra Oh is a virtuoso.

She treats dialogue like notes of music.

And then just recently, you met Megan the Stallion at a gala.

And when she saw you, and I'm juxtaposing this for a reason, she said, the icon, the legend, wow, my whole year is made.

I don't have to do anything else.

How do you feel about that when people see you and are just overwhelmed?

I really take that question to heart because it's taken me a long time to actually really receive it.

I don't usually pay attention and I don't usually listen to it.

And I've you know, coming into deep into our midlife, I'm needing to listen to things that somehow I felt like I need to protect myself from either because I want it so badly or I just don't believe it.

And I think a part of being a full person in midlife is to actually hear the positive things or

one's effect on people.

And so

I think I'm still working on it to receive it.

You know,

in 12th night, there is this one little passage that I've been working on, and I work on it.

It's in Act 5, Scene 1.

And Olivia is speaking to Viola, who's pretending to be Cesario.

And she says, fear not, Cesario.

Take thy fortunes up.

Be that thou knowest thou art.

And then thou art as great as that thou fearest.

So for me, it's always a clue for me.

I can't remember a line.

Like I have to work on it, because there's something in the line that I need to somehow ingest or understand.

I don't understand that line quickly enough.

But in that is actually, I think, the answer to your question, which is what I'm trying to work with, which is to not be afraid and to take thy fortunes up.

Were you afraid of it going to your head or were you feeling like you didn't deserve it?

I feel like it threw me off balance.

I feel like I couldn't keep focusing on just the work, that there was something about it that was

sometimes it's you're dealing with a projection that can be a little overwhelming.

And I think I needed to kind of build my interior self to be able to stand steady with it.

So we're here in New York, but you live in Los Angeles.

And you, like many people, had to evacuate your home during the wildfires earlier.

Oh, no, we didn't have to evacuate, but we were on standby, yes.

You were on standby.

You were thinking about it.

Oh, yes.

And we chatted before this event, and you told me how you had to make this difficult decision about what to to take with you if you were going to have to leave.

Can you tell me that story, what happened?

Sure, it was a tough time for everyone.

And

we were close to one of the fires.

So then it was like, what are we going to pack in our car?

And the first thing that I thought was I went to, honestly, my journals.

I have journals.

I have journals since 1982.

So there's a lot of them.

And then I thought, I can't take them all.

Which Which ones do I take?

Do I take the first ones?

Do I take the past 10 years, the last 10 years?

And, you know, it just makes you think, what are the things that are very, very important to you?

And I think that was the first thing that I thought about.

After you told me that story, I did ask you to bring some of those diaries with you.

And we're going to be reading from some of them.

And I want to start.

with an excerpt from a momentous day in your career.

This was your last day on Gray's Anatomy, which you were on for 10 seasons.

10 seasons, yeah.

It's amazing.

It was amazing.

And so please.

Yeah, sure.

April 25th, 2014.

Yesterday was my very last day of work on Grey's Anatomy.

It was joyous.

I waited for my call time.

I felt excited and jumpy to get to work.

I had my hug from Laura and my first last makeup from Norm.

Desiree and I danced to Michael Jackson in the trailer.

It was fun.

I passed everything out and wrote some more cards, grabbed a lousy lunch at the screening, took lots of pictures, lots of hugs.

Then after lunch, they surprised me with a ceremony thingy for me, Tony and Joan, cake sheet and cider.

Very lousy, cheap, and wonderful.

Chris said words.

Nicole and Brian and Carla gave me a frame call sheet, and I got two boxes filled with notes and gifts from the crew.

I was deeply moved.

We shot my last scene in the OR with my Kev.

I was in the gallery alone, tapping on the glass.

I'd tap on the glass, wave goodbye, and then I'd fold to the ground and close the work.

Then afterwards, Kev threw a little get-together with food and margaritas back in Tony's office area.

We ended the evening all in a circle, gabbing and gabbing, telling such fun and horror stories.

So I'm interested in you saying that it was joyous.

I don't hear maybe a lot of sadness.

This is the end of the biggest thing in your career.

Why were you so happy?

No, no, no.

It's because, like,

you know,

I'm still working on and figuring out what that decade of my life was.

Not everyone gets to know that they're leaving a show.

Yeah.

And I was in, I think, a very, very

fortuitous position.

And I took advantage of it fully, meaning that

I wanted to leave well.

And I think that for me, one of the proudest things that I have in my life is how I left the show, because I was as conscious as possible with all the crew members and actually even with the public.

I think I joined Instagram then.

And it was basically to help people say goodbye as I was saying goodbye.

It was very, very, very thought out.

It's really, anyone who does like TV and R stuff, it's really, really hard to say goodbye because stuff is fast.

You leave, you know, you know, you end, you cut, and then you kind of go.

But I actually

really worked to say thank you to everyone and to leave on my own terms.

Okay, I want to break some news early here because you gave an interview this year where you said there's a chance you'd go back.

What would it take?

Are we talking guest appearance or is Christina moving back to Seattle, Grays?

You know what?

I got to tell you, let me redefine that for a second.

What I have noticed, you know, this is 10 years out from leaving the show, is

the deep appreciation that I have for the people who appreciate Christina.

And it is that love that has made me go, oh.

The fans really, really, really want it.

And that for the first time, that's when I started opening up the idea but for me

I think to really be true to the people who enjoy your work you have to be true to yourself so at this point

I don't think so

okay

sad face

I want to go back to your roots you grew up in Canada your parents moved there from Korea your mom was a biochemist

your dad was a businessman clearly both very driven people

how did they influence some of your early ambition?

You know, I think that's a part about when you grow up a child of immigrants, right?

You know,

I don't know, maybe I can't say that because you grew up a child of immigrants, like you see your parents work so hard.

There is something to that.

I grew up as a child of immigrants, and there's something to that.

And you know what you have, and you know what you don't have.

And then you can also see that what you want in your life, and that you realize you cannot bother people for that.

You have got to go do it yourself.

I'm not sure.

You You know, I would say that I think that I did get a very high dose of ambition and drive.

I actually think that comes a lot from my dad.

But also my parents are very religious.

And

there's something equal in that because

their belief that you do something for the good of humanity was a big thing in our family.

How you grow up, what you're supposed to do, and the responsibility that you have to do good.

And I think that also really, really influenced us.

You've described yourself as a very emotional child.

And you brought another diary entry that speaks to that.

Can you explain when this is from?

Yes, this is my very first entry.

And I just want to actually maybe prompt it with, don't worry.

Sunday, the 3rd of October, 1982.

Dear Ari, like diary.

I hate myself.

That's all.

Oh, yeah, I also think I'll commit suicide.

Spelt S-U-C-I-C-I-D-E.

Nothing is worth living for.

I'm no good at anything.

I'm never happy anymore.

I try so hard, but I never succeed.

Spelled S-U-C-C-I-D-E.

Mom and dad always laugh at me when I try.

I do stupid mistakes.

Mom always yells at me.

I have no no self-confidence.

I don't believe in myself.

I can't do anything.

Someday I'll run real far, so far that no one will ever find me.

I have a lot of thoughts, but I can't write them all down.

I hate myself.

Monday, the 4th of October.

A great day.

Don't worry, I turned out okay.

When you were revisiting this,

were you surprised?

I gotta tell you, I just have so much compassion for that young person.

And honestly, I'm so pleased with myself that at 11, with so much feeling, that I unconsciously found some place to regulate myself, which was writing.

I remember my mom didn't like it because I would always be writing, and she knew it was about her.

You know what I mean?

She knew.

I was like, What are you always writing?

And I think that has just been

a receptacle that started out as an unconscious place to feel safe, but eventually has helped me figure it out who I am.

You know,

there is a sense of a little girl who is just figuring herself out, possibly having a bad day, but also someone who feels deeply and connects deeply with herself and maybe the world around her.

Did you know that you needed to have like artistic expression, that you needed to sort of have that kind of creative outlet when you were a kid?

Yes.

Yes.

I think I knew it

real young.

I know that I love performing and I love dancing and I started ballet when I was four.

And I loved it.

I loved it.

And I just had so much feeling.

It was very hard to manage.

But I really remember my mom with this, like, she would just let it all happen

and just let it run its course.

But I think that when I think about or try and feel that young person,

I think it was a natural thing that I found an avenue to be able to express that because I just had so much of it inside.

So there's a fun fact.

At age 15, you were in an improv group called Skid Row High.

That's true.

A pun on Skid Row.

And Alanis Morissette was briefly in the group because, of course, were you two friends?

I mean, do all Canadian famous people kind of come from the same place?

Well, Canadians, we all know each other.

I mean, that is kind of true.

But, you know, Alanis came in very, very briefly to

this group.

Oh, my gosh, it's so great.

Oh, my gosh.

It's so great.

Yeah, she came in, but she was also in the midst of like really a burgeoning music and musical career.

So she just came in for like a couple of shows and we did,

gosh, we performed shows where she would sing and some of us would be her backup singers.

I'm not joking.

Gosh, does anybody know her song, Fate Stay With Me?

Fate, Fate, Fate Stay With Me.

I wanna be wanna be wanna.

I can't believe it.

I haven't thought about that since I was in the past.

I impressed.

But we would be on stage with her kind of like singing backup.

It was actually a really super creative time.

You know,

there were these guys who were in

Second City in Toronto and they moved to Ottawa and they created this amazing

improv games for kids.

And it started in Ottawa and then it grew to nationwide.

And I learned a lot.

I learned a lot from them.

You became an American citizen in 2018, and you're now a dual citizen.

And you became a citizen so you could vote in the U.S.

elections after Trump came into office.

I want to ask you about talking politics in this moment.

Oh, boy.

Do you think there's a chilling effect now that people don't in Hollywood want to express themselves politically because

things have changed?

Absolutely.

Yes.

Do you think it's coming from a place where actors are self-censoring because they don't want to alienate certain groups?

Or do you you think it's coming from overhead where studios are sort of afraid of being penalized by this administration?

Oh, I don't think it's, I don't think it's as conscious as that.

You know,

I think when you're a public figure,

you understand

that there are systems that are larger than you.

You know what I mean?

And I think what's so difficult is that when you lose your story and you lose your narrative and you have no control over that, That is a very, very distressing place to be.

What you're always thinking about: am I going to lose my livelihood or then not feel safe?

Am I someone gonna dox me or all that stuff?

And so, I think, again, people who are have a public profile are always kind of managing that.

But it's really because it's so easy to have things out of context, be misunderstood, and mostly losing

losing one's own identity in someone else's or some other system's story.

Do you think we're losing something by actors and actresses and others feeling afraid to actually be able to express themselves?

Or do you think actually it's better that they're not like repining?

The thing is, some people can, and some people want to.

And I understand that right now we're in the middle of an interview, right?

But my work is not to give an interview.

It's a part of it, right?

My work for me is not to make statements.

My work is to be an artist and to create stories, be a part of stories, make you feel things, make you feel connected, connect with material that you might not have thought about.

That's my work, right?

I try and concentrate on that because that's my job.

My job is to make you feel something.

Then let's talk about your work because you're going to be in Shakespeare in the park here in New York, in one of my own favorite Shakespeare plays, 12th Night.

I played Mariah in high school.

Love you.

Happy to know.

This one is very starry.

It has you, Lupita Nyongo, Peter Dinklage.

So, how is the rehearsal going?

You're not yet.

You haven't started.

Yeah,

then how are you looking forward to it?

Oh, my goodness.

I mean, I will say I started learning this very early.

Finding myself deep into my midlife, the way that I learn things now and the way that I work is totally different.

I need to, it doesn't stay in my head.

It needs to enter my body.

So I started learning these lines like probably in February.

Very slow.

I'm slow.

And in February, and it's just been a joy.

And again, as I brought up earlier, that quote, like when you have time to kind of just really, really play with and wonder what's underneath these words to my own life, it's just been joyous.

I mean, you play interesting women who are complicated, idiosyncratic.

And a lot of Shakespeare is up to the actor's interpretation.

So what are you thinking about for Olivia?

Oh, I don't know.

I don't know.

Oh, you don't know?

I don't, no, no.

it's also like this.

I want to be very, very facile with the dialogue, right?

And then all you want to do is like to be as present as possible to whoever you're acting with.

It's impossible to know kind of what you're going to do without the other person.

That's the thing about theater, right?

It's like, you know, when you're on film, like, I don't know how many times I've acted to a piece of tape.

You know what I mean?

Because that's just it is, or you can't see the angle, you can't see the person.

So, you know, you're acting to it like a piece of tape on a tennis ball, right?

But the theater is all about

like all I'm doing is reacting to what you're saying and the questions that you're asking me, right?

So, I don't know what I'm going to say, I don't know how it's going to be, and I don't want to settle into anything before I know,

oh my God, how Lupita's going to say something.

So, I'm so excited.

Yeah.

I mean, when you say that you don't know who Olivia is yet for you, I'm thinking of other female characters that you've played that are so iconic.

The through line that I see in these characters, if you think about Christina and you think about Eve, Pilastri,

and now Olivia, is that a lot of these roles are about relationships with other women.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, clearly you're drawn to that.

Yeah.

I mean, you don't, I don't choose it for that, right?

But like,

well, you're right.

But,

but eventually, then it becomes that.

I think also for me, like

the life of a woman, do you know what what I mean?

The fullness and the wholeness of our psyche.

I'm always interested in that.

I'm always wanting to play in that field, not only for myself, but just for us to see it.

You know what I mean?

To see it, that it's not in service.

And this is also what I'm very, very, very grateful for.

It's not, but the characters, a lot of the characters I've played are not in service for the typical structure of, you know, the husband or the hero man or whatever.

I'm never cast in that, by the way.

I'm never cast in that.

You know, I was always so hurt by that because it's like, I want to get parts.

I want to get parts in big things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But really, sometimes those characters are not full-fleshed characters and full-fleshed women.

And I think I am

absolutely, I guess I am drawn to that, yeah.

You've actually brought up something that is interesting, which is the parts that you have been cast in and the parts that you haven't been cast in.

And I want to ask you here to read from a moment moment in your life when you encountered real discrimination in Hollywood.

I can't believe all those prompts.

I was like, oh my God, I have something for that.

Because you've talked about this in other interviews.

You had just arrived from Canada and were looking for representation and you took a meeting with a big agent.

August 1st, 1995.

You just don't know what's ahead of you.

That's the good and the bad of it.

You just can't see what lies ahead.

So says Sheila, calming me with her faith.

Like Joel said as I wept into the payphone outside the building where my appointment canceled out on me.

Just when you think you can handle the rejection, something comes along that's new or different and it's the same.

The pain's the same and overwhelming.

And you try not to take it so personally or cosmically, but you feel it.

Nothing she could think of to send me out on?

Nothing?

There's nothing there for me?

Why am I here?

What do I have to do to make a place for me in this world?

She goes, people aren't open.

Basically, there are no parts for you because you're Asian, so you're better off getting famous in Canada and living there.

You need tape and a movie with that.

I have all that.

Now what do I do?

And then,

where is the art?

Through all this shit, putting on makeup and armor to make it through the day.

And where is the work?

And I can feel myself starving, starving for the work, the growth of the working kind.

And not beat yourself up for wanting to go home.

Yes, it's a new place.

Yes, it's hard.

But thinking, I've got to do this.

Do what, San?

Do what?

So much further to go.

Is this what it is to be an artist?

To try and be one?

I feel uncomfortable and would never call myself one confidently.

Artist, actor, yeah, but artist, there's something greater in that, something to do with time, with skill, with

I want to be one.

Patience, says Sheila.

I know you have enough faith, but it's patience.

And what if this is it?

Isn't there more I'm supposed to do?

Isn't there more I'm supposed to become?

When you revisited that,

what was that like?

You know,

that experience of meeting that agent and being told a bunch of stuff,

it's taken me a long time to untangle that.

It's taken me a very, very long time.

The saving grace, I think, for me was that question.

Or was that desire?

I want to be an artist.

I want, what is this?

What am I supposed to do?

Because Because I think ultimately, that's how I figured it out.

Because I followed that.

Do you know what I mean?

I didn't follow what that lady said, right?

I followed the question that I think I've always had, or that drive that was there to say, what am I supposed to do?

It doesn't feel like what she just said.

I know I'm here for something.

I don't know what.

So I think that so much of how

who I've become kind of stems even from that entry.

What

helped you say, that's not me?

I won't internalize that, that's not me.

No, but I did.

I think I did internalize that profoundly.

I think that there's so much internalized

self-hatred and I mean, not to get too much of a downer, but there is a lot of internalized hatred, racism, sexism that I think, you know, again, this is the great thing about hitting midlife.

For me, it's just been something that it's taken a long time.

And I think I can't be the only one that it takes this long to try and untangle.

In your previous entry on that terrible day outside that agent's office said, Would you consider yourself an artist?

You know, you were grappling with that question.

Have you come to an answer now?

Can you feel confident in the answer now?

I do.

I do.

I feel confident as an artist.

And

I don't,

I think

it takes time.

So the Sheila I'm talking about is beautiful Sheila Benson.

She was the film critic of the LA Times for many, many years.

And she's no longer with us.

And I,

anyway.

But she was older than I when I stayed with her.

And it's just the way that she says, you can't see what's going to come.

And you need patience.

You cannot see that when you're 24.

you cannot and that's okay but what i see now through patience of not patience but actually going through 30 years of life is that like if your aim is true i just when you do that with devotion and you gain skill and practice it for a long time i do think that's what develops a life as an of an artist

You're now in your 50s and you've been talking about middle age and I'm wondering how you're settling into that.

It's great.

It's great.

Don't let anyone fool you.

Like, seriously, don't let anyone fool you.

I feel it's tougher on my body.

It's tougher on my mind in certain ways, but it is great.

Let me tell you, it is great because

I feel balanced enough to really start digging into very important questions when you realize that it is not up to anyone else to free you.

It's up to yourself.

So it's just like whether you have body issues, whether, again, things about your past, you know, how you grew up, your trauma, those are the things that now you have some space and are able to kind of handle grappling.

Because those things stay down, repressed for a very long time.

And I think you have to grow in an interior sense to be able to handle those things that come up.

But my joints hurt.

My joints hurt now.

I want to to end with your journal.

You chose something that you wrote in the last few weeks.

Oh, I will say I think I write a little differently now because basically all my journal entries are kind of, it's rarely now just kind of like a straight journal entry.

It's much more poetic and it's much more, there's images and there's drawings and scribbles.

But I'll share this.

May 21st, 2025.

I know I'm jumping all around with my journals and I'm not sure why that matters much, seeing that I'm probably not going to get around to reading all this, like putting together all the clues of my life or figuring out myself as an artist.

I think somewhere, maybe always,

I wanted a record so that sometime in the future I could, or someone else, could figure out who I am or was,

have one fell swoop.

to see all the patterns, where I grew, how I didn't, what was going on, putting together all the clues from my daytimers, what I was doing, where was I traveling, what I was thinking to remember or to imagine.

I want to thank you for opening your diaries to all of us.

It is an act of intimacy and

I think it really helped us understand you better.

So thank you, Sandra O.

Thank you, Lulu.

Thank you so much.

After the break, I talked to Sandra again, this time just us, one-on-one, and we do wade into politics.

The words diversity, Equity, and inclusion are good things.

To be awake is a good thing.

Those are words that I take to heart and that have now been co-opted and now vilified.

It's heartbreaking to me.

We all have moments when we could have done better.

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Or forgetting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato.

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Could have done better.

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Hi, Sandra.

How are you?

I'm so happy to see you.

Hi, hi, hey.

Hi, hi, hi.

I got a little bit of a cold at the commencement speech.

Yeah, since we spoke, you gave a commencement speech at Dartmouth.

I did.

Like I said, the commencement speech was very stressful for me.

I'm not stressful.

That's not the right word, but then I got sick.

You

had been talking to me about how stressed you were about it.

Why was it stressful actually doing it?

You know, I think it's the call to speak to young people, especially at this moment, that, you know, when Shonda presented the offer to me, it was actually last year, at the end of September in 24.

And so many things have changed since September 24.

And as things kept on ramping up, the depth of where I felt like I had to go to be able to speak honestly to this group of graduates became much more serious.

And so I think that's why, I don't know if nervous is, yeah, I think it was.

I think I was nervous, but I think I do this.

I think this is my tendency to do this.

I

put a lot of pressure on myself to be able to really deliver something

that will hopefully be useful to them.

You know, you've just touched on something which I wanted to ask you about because, in our first conversation, you really didn't want to talk about politics, but in your speech, you did nod to this political moment.

And here's what you said: What if I say the wrong thing?

What if I were to talk about

diversity,

equity?

Okay, okay.

What if I change the words?

Like

including diverse equalness

or diverting equitable inclusivity.

Would that still be bad?

Could I get deported?

See, that should be a bad joke.

And it is,

but it's not.

What it made me think about was that you've said before that part of the reason that you were initially cast in roles early in your career in Canada was because the government there had mandates for multiculturalism.

And I was wondering like what mandates for inclusion have done for you personally.

Oh,

huge.

Are you kidding me?

Oh my gosh, like when I was cast, you know, my early days of cutting my teeth, of being in front of a camera, that was when I was in high school in Ottawa.

And because I am myself, I am an Asian woman, and I also speak French.

Oh my gosh, I've ticked out so many boxes.

You know, it's a double-edged sword because, you know, I couldn't move up so high up the ladder because the structure of casting and racism is entrenched, right?

But because Canada is

the way that the country is set up, there is more inclusion.

There's more understanding that people have come from someplace else to come to this country and that this country was, you know, taken from our Indigenous people and First Nations people, right?

And during that time,

it wasn't like I didn't know it.

And that causes itself things that you have to figure out as someone who benefits from DEI.

But it gave me...

a foot in the door and it also gave me a lot of experience.

Through your own experience, I'm wondering what you think think we might have lost with this push against DEI.

And then because you talked about that double-edged sword, might there be gains because we are re-examining how we deal with this very persistent problem of structural racism?

This is like such a huge question, those two points of it, that I also speaking to

you know, another woman of color, it's really important conversation, you know, because I'd say probably I would imagine,

you know, both of us were in a similar age.

There's a lot of time that we just spent with our heads down and doing the work,

and then eventually the work rising to get to the place where we are at.

And that did happen for the both of us.

Yeah, it did.

But meanwhile, there's a lot of things that either we benefited from, or a lot of the things that we had to bat away, or a lot of the things that we are still internally wrestling with.

But I want to start at the beginning of your question, which is what is lost?

For me, what is lost is

the real beginning of

a recognition that I thought was happening in the past five to seven years, that there was a recognition that racism actually exists and it's a structural issue.

And from my point of view, it is not a blame game.

It just is.

But it's kind of trying to come to a truthful or an agreed-upon upon reality that in the larger picture of what we know, life is not fair.

And so the words diversity, equity, and inclusion are good things.

To be awake is a good thing.

Those are words that I take to heart and that have now been co-opted and now vilified.

It's heartbreaking to me.

because

what's being lost or what's being dismantled is a recognition that life is not fair.

So that's the thing that I think is really painful.

Yeah, I think one of the things that I've found hardest when a discussion

about DEI and what it means has sort of surfaced is that it has been increasingly hard.

to find the language to talk about the realities that many

black, brown, Asian people deal with every day.

There had been a language for that and that language seems no longer to be available.

And so it's made it, I think, very hard for people to really talk about their experience in the world and see that experience of racism and discrimination validated.

I totally agree.

I totally agree, but I also feel like it's always going to be talked about.

We'll always find community.

And it's also, I think the real muscle around it is being okay with yourself

and or in our industry, having a relationship with your creative self.

Because that relationship will ground you as all these waves of whatever disappointment, whatever you get harassed, whatever, I mean, it's going to happen.

And the more you have a relationship with that and can concentrate on that,

the stronger you will be to figure out your language with others and to keep grounded and your heart open.

So, we ended our first interview with one of your journal entries, and there's a line in there.

I want to come back to you.

You wrote that you thought maybe the journals could be one fell swoop to see all the patterns where I grew and how I didn't.

Where do you feel like you still need to grow?

Oh,

Lila, I want to ask you the same question because I feel like we are at very similar points in our life.

You know, women who are deep into this very rich middle part of your life.

And I really appreciate this time because I also think that only now do you have enough strength and hopefully curiosity to go into the places of asking the question, why did I do that?

Who has been steering this ship?

Because now on this back half of my life, I'm the captain of this ship.

I am me,

right?

Now

I am really working with the internalization of

my own issues, like, which by God, we all have what it is to live in a patriarchal society, what it is to live as a person of color in a predominantly white society, how How that has made me who I am now, and now what I need to do to free myself from it as much as I can for the rest of my life.

That's Sandra Oh.

She'll be in 12th night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park starting August 7th.

This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly.

It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, mixing by Sophia Landman, original music by Pat McCusker, Rowan Nemisto, and Marian Lozano.

Photography by Devin Yalkin.

Our senior booker is Priya Matthew, and Wyatt Orm is our producer.

Our senior video journalist is Paula Neudorf.

Our executive producer is Allison Benedict.

Special thanks to Davey Gardner and the whole Tribeca team.

Also thanks to Christina Josa, Rory Walsh, Renan Barelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddie Mastiello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dulhick.

If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to the interview wherever you get your podcasts.

To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash the interview.

And you can email us anytime at theinterview at nytimes.com.

Also, we have a new YouTube channel where you can watch many of our interviews.

Subscribe at youtube.com slash at symbol the interview podcast.

Next week, David talks with former Secretary of Labor Robert Reisch.

I'm asked very often, should the Democrats move to the center?

I don't even know what the center is.

Where is the center

between

democracy and dictatorship, which is what we're really now facing?

I'm Ludo Garcia Navarro, and this is the interview from the New York Times.