Sandra Oh Was Excited By Korean Representation at the 2022 SAG Awards

Sandra Oh Was Excited By Korean Representation at the 2022 SAG Awards

Sandra Oh didn’t win in her category, but she loved seeing Korean Netflix series Squid Game triumph at the 2022 SAG Awards last weekend.

Sandra Oh says she was excited by the Korean representation she saw from the Squid Game cast at the 2022 SAG Awards. The Canadian actor was nominated by the Screen Actors Guild for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series for The Chair, which released on Netflix in August of last year. The show, which saw Oh play the newly appointed English Department chair at the fictional Pembroke University, was well received by critics, though there has been no announcement of The Chair season 2 just yet.

While Oh ultimately lost out to Jean Smart for the HBO series Hacks, the stars of the hit Korean Netflix series Squid Game ultimately fared better. Competing in the Drama Series category, the acclaimed show about a group of down-on-their-luck contestants playing a deadly series of children’s games for a life-changing cash prize saw two of its actors take home awards, with Lee Jung-jae and Jung Ho-yeon victorious in their respective lead categories. This meant their triumph over the favored Succession stars, though Squid Game would ultimately lose Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series to that acting juggernaut.

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Related: The Chair Season 2 News & Updates: Everything We Know

Though she didn’t leave with a statuette, Oh says she was tremendously excited by the Korean representation on display at the 2022 SAG Awards. Speaking to Variety on the red carpet of her latest film, Pixar’s Turning Red, she points out that seeing so many Korean faces in an awards show audience hasn’t happened often in her career, and she’s grateful to still be around as it starts becoming more commonplace. Oh then explains why Squid Game receiving such recognition from the Screen Actors Guild, their peers, was so important for the industry at large. Check out her full comments below:

Oh, yes! It was so exciting! I gotta tell you, being at the SAG Awards, I couldn’t believe how many Korean people were there. I was like, ‘There’s a Korean! That’s a Korean! That’s a Korean!’ But you know what… I gotta tell you, you know, being at this game for a long time, that wasn’t the case for a long time. So to be able to still be here while it’s happening, and witnessing it, is extremely satisfying. […] You know, I feel like being recognized by your peers, such as the SAG Awards are, is very important to a global acceptance of actors. You know, we are all – you know, those of us who are actors – it’s a big family, it’s a tribe. And that was really what the SAGs were about.

Sandra Oh in The Chair

The victories for Squid Game were tremendously exciting for the cast as well as the show’s fans, and as Oh says, they do seem to be part of a trend of an increasingly global scope at the SAG Awards. This is notably the third consecutive year that Korean actors have been recognized, after the Parasite cast took home the night’s biggest prize in 2020 and Youn Yuh-jung won for her supporting turn in Minari last year. Broaden that to include actors of Korean heritage, and the streak stretches back to 2019, when Oh herself won for Killing Eve.

This should not in itself be surprising, as the Korean film and TV industry has a stellar reputation, but Hollywood’s growing willingness to recognize international projects outside of foreign-language categories has been an exciting development of the last few years. The 2022 Oscar nominations, for example, also mark the fourth consecutive year that the Best Director category features a filmmaker whose film was not in English, with Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi nominated for Drive My Car. Ideally, the American entertainment industry will continue to fund projects like The Chair that center diverse stars in English-language projects, while more shows like Squid Game are afforded the platform that allows for them to be discovered and appreciated by a global audience.

Next: Squid Game “Universe” Could Be A Bigger Risk Than Netflix Realizes

Source: Variety

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Alexander Harrison
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Alex is a Movie/TV News Editor & Writer at Screen Rant. After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in English, he spent a locked-down year in Scotland completing a Master’s in Film Studies from the University of Edinburgh, which he hears is a nice, lively city. He now lives in and works from Milan, Italy.

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