‘Ballad Of A Small Player’ Star Fala Chen On Edward Berger’s Thriller & Her Debut Directorial Project ‘Inheritance’

Fala Chen‘s entertainment career has soared and flourished through several different acts.

She first rose through the ranks as an actress at Hong Kong‘s broadcaster for eight years, before getting off the waitlist at Juilliard, and is now going from strength to strength in her career in Hollywood and beyond, starring in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, among others.

She is also set to make her directorial debut this December, with a project titled Inheritance.

Chen sits down with Deadline to share about her journey, on the sidelines of the BFI London Film Festival, where she has graced the red carpet twice this week at the festival premieres of Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player and Lloyd Lee Choi’s Lucky Lu.

The first act

Born in Chengdu, China, and brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, Chen’s career in entertainment kicked off after she won a few beauty pageants.

She soon signed a contract with Hong Kong broadcaster TVB, becoming a familiar fixture in the station’s hit dramas like Heart of Greed, Moonlight Resonance and No Regrets.

After nearly a decade in the Hong Kong film and TV industry and at the height of her career there, Chen decided to leave, and soon won a place to study at Juilliard for four years.

After graduating, she appeared in The Undoing alongside Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, and then starred in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

She also featured in the HBO comedy series Irma Vep and starred as Iwi Queen in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

Joining Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player

Ballad of a Small Player marks a fond homecoming of sorts for Chen.

Directed by Edward Berger (Conclave, All Quiet on the Western Front), the British psychological thriller was filmed in Hong Kong and Macau.

Based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Lawrence Osborne, the film stars Chen alongside Colin Farrell, Deanie Ip, Alex Jennings and Tilda Swinton.

The film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, before also screening in Toronto and London. Ballad of a Small Player will stream on Netflix from October 29.

Chen tells Deadline that she first met Berger over Zoom a few times, when he was scouting for locations in Macau.

Berger then flew to New York to meet Chen and audition her for the role of Dao Ming. In the film, her mysterious character meets self-styled swashbuckling gambler “Lord Doyle” in the labyrinthian casinos of Macau.

Reflecting on the audition with Berger, Chen says: “I was nervous, but then I walked into the room that Edward was in, and I just felt this immense trust that he has in me. I played the first scene, and he’s like, ‘That was perfect. That was wonderful. I have no notes. You want to do it again? Or we can move on.’

“And then we did the second scene, and the third scene, and it was just like, ‘I have no notes. It’s great.’ I thought that I either nailed this audition, or I completely f—ed it up, because he doesn’t even know where to start.”

It was the former for Chen, and she soon snagged the role of the enigmatic, inscrutable Dao Ming in the film.

On returning to film in Hong Kong and Macau, Chen says: “It felt like a homecoming, because I was away for many years. I had a detour: I went to drama school and started a family, so I haven’t filmed in Hong Kong in 10 years. It felt familiar, yet very different. The world changes so fast.

“Macau has developed this mega casino city, so it was very different from what I had imagined and remembered. Stepping onto that stage, which is what I would call Macau — as it is in a way, a stage — it felt like I was ready to go into this world.

Chen adds: “There’s this really lovely, quiet support that I felt from the crew, because most of our crew are actually local hires. The local crew are all from Hong Kong. They spoke Cantonese on set, shouting in Cantonese. There were many people who I had worked and crossed paths with in my past career. I felt safe and I felt seen. Working in Hollywood, I’m still navigating it and I’m so grateful for all the opportunities that I’ve had so far, but there’s something really different in being with people and crew who look like you and speak your language.”

Going to Juilliard

Chen admits that she has never said this in the press before: after two day-long rounds of auditions in 2014, she found out by email that she had been waitlisted by Juilliard.

Heartbroken at first — two days later, Chen got an update that she was off the waitlist, and part of Juilliard’s newest class.

“It was kind of hitting the lottery,” says Chen.

Why did Chen, at the height of her career in Hong Kong, decide to begin anew as an actress at Juilliard, at the age of 32?

“I did so much work in Hong Kong, and that was at the height of paparazzi culture and all of it, and I was young and the amount of pressure that came from work kind of consumed me in a way that I was a little lost,” admits Chen. “I never trained in acting, and I was learning from other actors and piecing things together, but there wasn’t a system where I could learn. I had to figure it out on my own, but I’ve never felt that that was enough for me. I was at rock bottom, in an identity crisis as an actor. I felt like I needed to go somewhere else, and that calling was drama school.”

Describing the audition and application process at Juilliard, she says: “In the initial audition, you get this number pinned on. You go through rooms, they call your number, you go into another room, and you do a group exercise, and they watch you. Then you go in one by one, to do a Shakespeare monologue, and then you do a contemporary monologue. If they want you to do another one immediately, you have to have it. And then you sing a song.”

She got a callback in the afternoon after the initial round, finding out from a piece of paper pasted on a wall with a list of names on it. After more monologues, and more teachers scrutinizing her performances, she went home, and waited.

A final callback, with just 40 people left vying for spots.

Chen says that while the experience of selection was stressful, it was still “the best experience” of her life then.

“It was like a two-day workshop and I felt like I had learned so much, and I was so fulfilled,” says Chen. “I was like, this is what I want out of my life. Two days of just being with artists. We still had numbers, I think I had number 10 on my back, but you watch and participate in classes, you go watch a play and have discussions about the play.

“It was like taking two days of classes at Juilliard, full time. I auditioned for Yale. I auditioned for schools in England and Australia, and I got into some of them, but Juilliard just felt like the perfect fit… there’s no particular method — they meet you at where you are at in your career,” adds Chen.

Chen says that she was interviewed by the late James Houghton, who was then the head of Juilliard’s Drama Division.

“He straight up asked me, ‘Do you think you’re too old for this program?’ Because I was the oldest of all the applicants. They’re divided between the BFA and MFA programs, even the MFAs were in their 20s. I would start school at 32 and end at 36, so he was like, ‘Are you sure you want to invest this much time in your life into this program? Are you committed for four years, given the career that you have?’ I just expressed why I was there, and they were convinced that I was ready to do it,” adds Chen.

And then, an email arrived in her inbox from Juilliard bearing disappointing news. Chen had been waitlisted.

Chen shares that the waitlist messed with her head at that time, knowing she had come so devastatingly close to a place at the school. She later got a call that she was off the waitlist.

“I just remembered that I was in Hong Kong and had my cat with me in my bed,” says Chen. “I took Teddy, my cat, and said, ‘Teddy, we’re moving back to the US. We’re moving to New York. Yes, talking to my cat.

“They made me wait, and I was like, this is meant to be. It was so clear to me, that someone else planned this for me. I did my best, but someone else picked me and gave me this path,” adds Chen.

At Juilliard, only around four women get admitted in each cohort — something that she says gives her a glimpse of what getting nominated for the Oscars would feel like. “If I ever get nominated for an Oscar, I would imagine it to be a similar level excitement, where out of over 2000 people, they pick four women.”

Hollywood comes calling

Chen graduated in the summer of 2018, just as Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians premiered and set off a watershed year for Asian and Asian American talent in the US.

Chen managed to get an agent right out of the gates from graduation.

“The timing was so funny, because before drama school, I thought that I’ll just do theater, or go to Hong Kong and continue my career,” says Chen “I didn’t know at all where my career was going and I had no plan whatsoever. And then Crazy Rich Asians came out and boom, there’s this huge energy and desire for Asian actors in Hollywood.

“I was one of the first out of my class to get an agent. I got approached by many agents and I just met one agent that I really connected with, and I still work with him today — Stephen Travierso. He not only saw me as this Asian actress, but saw me — as he he works with a lot of Juilliard actors — as a unique human being, and we just really connected. I was like, ‘Wait, am I going to have a career in the US now? I guess I’ll stay, and I’ll start auditioning.”

Chen starred in HBO psychological thriller series The Undoing in 2020, before booking the role of Ying Li in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings the year after.

She also featured in Irma Vep and in the Warner Bros-distributed pic Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

Reflecting on the different turns and twists in her life on-screen and off-screen, Chen says that she has embraced each move and new place she has called home.

“I think I’m more comfortable all my life living in various places, because my parents worked and lived all over,” says Chen. “My mom was in Beijing for grad school for a few years, and I was with my dad, and he went to the US, and I was with my mom, and we traveled around the world. I’m more comfortable being on the move, and I thrive on adapting to new places. When I’m in one place for too long, I have this urge to try something else and live somewhere else.”

Chen’s next act

Chen says that she is ready to add directing to her list of credits.

“My creative energy has to go somewhere else, because you’re not working every day as an actor, so in between that, I also just wrote a script, and I’m directing it in December,” says Chen.

She has brought several talent that she has worked with before, for this project. “One from Godzilla x Kong, two from Shang-Chi and two from Lucky Lu,” Chen reels off.

“I want to tell stories that I feel like we haven’t seen,” says Chen. “I invited the different heads of departments from films that I’ve worked on before… I’m really excited about learning so much from everybody: my colleagues, but they’re also my teachers now. I’ve worked with them in a different capacity, as an actor, but now I’m behind the scenes and can learn what they do.

In her acting career, Chen also craves for more roles where her characters are not primarily defined by their racial or ethnic identity.

“I just want to do so many more characters, whether it’s playing a Chinese woman like Dao Ming, who is very three-dimensional, and a deep and complex character, or someone whose main characteristic is not just a Chinese woman, as her identity. For her skin color not to be at the forefront of her identity, but just for her to be a human being,” says Chen.

Chen is also on the lookout for a role in a comedy.

“I’ve never done a lot of comedy,” adds Chen. “In drama school, I was told that I was such a comedian. No one believes me, but people just cracked up. I don’t think I’m a clown, but there are parts of myself that I have yet to explore as an actor.”