Stephanie Hsu, the Oscar nominee Hollywood keeps hearing instead of seeing

Stephanie Hsu

Photo: John Sears / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 25, 1990 Torrance, California, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Wild Robot, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Awards	SAG Award · Independent Spirit · SAG Award (shared)

On the stage of Studio 54, Janet Weiss, the prim fiancée who exists in The Rocky Horror Show mostly to be shocked, became something else when Stephanie Hsu played her: a woman enjoying her own corruption a little more than anyone else in the room. The director, Sam Pinkleton, pitched the part to her, she has said, as “an awakened sapphic creature” and “Frank 2.0.” Tony voters put her on the ballot. It was the clearest proof yet of what the actress behind Jobu Tupaki can do in front of a live audience, and of how rarely the screen has given her the same room.

That gap is the real story of her career since Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Oscar nomination was supposed to open the door to leading roles. Two arrived, and neither survived a second season. Her voice, meanwhile, has become one of the busiest in animation, and Netflix is closing the year with three projects built around it.

Torrance, California, is where Hsu was born, on November 25, 1990, and where a single mother raised her. Her maternal grandmother had fled mainland China for Taiwan during the civil war; her mother later crossed to the United States from Taiwan as a teenager. After Palos Verdes Peninsula High School, Hsu went east to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, trained in the Experimental Theatre Wing under Elizabeth Swados, studied with the Atlantic Theater Company and did sketch comedy with Hammerkatz, a troupe that sometimes included a young Bowen Yang. She graduated in 2012.

The next stretch was the unglamorous kind that builds a performer. She has described starting out “in basements and off-off-Broadway,” and she paid rent as a talking head on MTV’s Girl Code, where she made more than fifty appearances, before landing her first recurring screen role, Joy Armstrong, in Hulu‘s cult drama The Path. Around the same time a commercial audition asked her to repeat a read “with a more Asian accent.” She told the room the role was not for her and walked out.

Theater gave her the first parts that fit. She originated Christine Canigula in Be More Chill, a musical about a high-school nobody who swallows a supercomputer in pill form, and stayed with it from its New Jersey premiere in 2015 through the internet-fueled off-Broadway run in 2018 to the Lyceum on Broadway in 2019. In between she played Karen, Plankton’s computer wife, in SpongeBob SquarePants on Broadway. Television followed: as Mei Lin, the medical student who becomes Joel Maisel’s girlfriend, she joined the last three seasons of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and shared the cast’s SAG ensemble award in 2020.

Then came Joy Wang. In the Daniels’ multiverse comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, Hsu plays a daughter who cannot make her mother see her and, in another universe, Jobu Tupaki, a nihilist who has seen everything and built an everything bagel to hold it. The role asked for deadpan hurt and gleeful annihilation in the same scene, and the switch between them became the film’s emotional engine. After its South by Southwest premiere the A24 release became the awards story of the season. Hsu won the first Independent Spirit Award for breakthrough performance, shared the Screen Actors Guild prize for best cast and was nominated for the Academy Award for supporting actress, a race her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis won.

What came next looked like the standard path. She was Kat, the soap-star friend hiding her past, in Adele Lim’s raunchy road comedy Joy Ride, and Alma Milan, assistant to a vain movie star, in David Leitch’s The Fall Guy. In Laid, which she also executive produced, she finally had a lead of her own: Ruby Yao, a Seattle party planner whose former lovers start dying in the order she slept with them. Critics liked it; the Rotten Tomatoes consensus called it a breezy showcase for her comedic chops. Peacock canceled it after one season, without the show ever reaching Nielsen’s streaming charts. Mindy Kaling’s Hulu comedy Not Suitable for Work, in which she played Chrys Lee, went the same way this summer, three months after it premiered.

Nothing in those reviews points to a talent problem. The harder question is one Hsu raised herself. During the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests she resolved, she said, to stop “deleting” herself as an Asian actress and to stop shrinking into a cameo just to add a line to a résumé. That principle narrows the field in an industry that still writes few leads for Asian American women outside a familiar set of stories, and some of her current work sits squarely inside that set. When Netflix released the trailer for Dang!, viewers online tore into it for recycling the strict-parents, impossible-standards template of Asian American family comedy before a single episode had aired.

Dang!, created by Andrew Law, premiered on Netflix on September 8, 2026, with Hsu voicing Ruthie, the perfectionist eldest sibling who turns up in New York pregnant and leaving a husband who is not the father. It is the first of three. On November 20 Netflix releases Steps, a Cinderella story told from the stepsisters’ side, with Ali Wong as Lilith and Hsu as Margot, the sister who spends much of the film as a frog. On December 11 comes In Waves, Phuong Mai Nguyen’s adaptation of AJ Dungo’s graphic novel about a young skater and the surfer he loves through her illness. It opened Critics’ Week at Cannes, the first animated film to do so, and Hsu voices Kristen in the English version opposite Will Sharpe.

The stage filled the rest of the year. Roundabout’s revival of The Rocky Horror Show opened at Studio 54 on April 23, 2026, with Luke Evans as Frank-N-Furter, Juliette Lewis as Magenta and Rachel Dratch narrating. Hsu’s Janet brought her a first Tony nomination, for best actress in a musical; the award went to Caissie Levy of Ragtime. Hsu, who identifies as queer, said the part “holds so much of my weird.” She played her last performance on August 23 and handed Janet to Lorna Courtney, and in September she signed with Range Media Partners.

The next leading role worth having may again come from somewhere other than a pilot order. What is already scheduled is concrete: a stepsister turned frog before Thanksgiving, a surfer facing cancer before Christmas, and behind both a voice that the industry has learned to trust long before it has learned to build a live-action series around the face that goes with it.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Luke Evans, The Rocky Horror Show, Ali Wong, DANG!

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