Lulu Wang on Expats, her new miniseries about Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

For Lulu Wang, there’s no question that her new, multi-layered Hong Kong-set TV series Expats would unfold in 2014, the year of the Umbrella Movement. Adapted from Janice Y. K. Lee’s 2016 novel The Expatriates, the show’s six episodes depict the sit-in street protests as urgent and vital, albeit often in the background. In the finale, an American expat, Margaret (Nicole Kidman), glances curiously at a TV news report about the demonstrations.

“It’s almost like it’s the first time she’s recognising that something’s happening,” says Wang, who created the show and directed each episode. “She’s incredibly selfish in her grief. It’s her right to. But by episode six, there’s some awareness that there’s pain equal to, or greater than, hers around her.”

After all, Expats is, really, about three women united by tragedy and privilege. In Hong Kong, Margaret is a wealthy, dissatisfied mother of three trapped in her own true-crime thriller; her Indian-American neighbour and frenemy, Hilary (Sarayu Blue), is a cheated-on wife who’s desperate for a child of her own; and then there’s the show’s standout character, Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), a Korean-American New Yorker who’s weighed down by guilt and impulsive, destructive behaviour.

“When Ji-young Yoo auditioned for the role, I instantly felt like she was Mercy,” says Wang. “She had a melancholy to her; a darkness she can’t escape. Ji-young brought the weight of this curse that she feels, and was also able to be funny.”

After two episodes, it’s revealed that – don’t read further if you wish to avoid spoilers – Margaret’s son, Gus, is missing. Mercy, a babysitter hired by Margaret, was looking after Gus when the boy vanished, or was possibly kidnapped, in a crowded market. The rest of the series covers a web of infidelity, the distorted relationship between expats and their caretakers, and the aforementioned Umbrella Movement – but from the perspective of ignorant expats.

“Because the expats community is such a bubble, it was important for me to show how such a monumental event for the locals who grew up in Hong Kong doesn’t affect the expats,” says Wang. “Only by breaking the bubble are we able to define how much of a bubble they’re in. When we take the audience outside of the bubble, we see what’s going on in the city outside of the personal drama of these expats, and we juxtapose the two worlds without any judgement.”

Wang, the 40-year-old writer-director behind The Farewell, is referring to episode five of Expats, “Central”, which is 96 minutes long and a movie in itself. In fact, when I speak to Wang, it’s at Charlotte Street Hotel during the London Film Festival, where “Central” screened for cinemagoers completely oblivious to what happened in the previous instalments. In episode five, the focus is on Margaret’s Filipino caretaker, Essie (Ruby Ruiz), and her gossipy friends, most of whom know all the dirt about their employers; Kidman, who’s front and centre of Amazon’s marketing campaign, doesn’t appear until the midway point.

Born in Beijing, Wang moved at the age of six to America, and made her directorial debut with 2014’s Posthumous, a quirky, Brit Marling-starring comedy. Her breakthrough, though, was in 2019 with The Farewell, a semi-autobiographical drama about a New York-based writer who visits China when her grandmother is on her deathbed. If it weren’t for the pandemic, she would have directed a sci-fi feature, Children of the New World, in 2020; when it fell apart, she returned to Expats.

While Expats is undeniably Wang’s show, Lee was part of the writers’ room, and Wang was brought onto the project after Kidman purchased the book rights and watched The Farewell. “Nicole is such a tremendous tool to have,” says Wang. “You can’t have six hours of the same tone. Nicole and I talked about how to give Margaret range, even though she’s grieving, and how to make her funny. It would be too much if she was grieving and hysterical the whole time.”

That said, Kidman’s involvement resulted in various backlashes during the production, to the extent that when I refer to the “controversy”, Wang asks me which one. For starters, Hong Kong publications complained that a show covering the Umbrella Movement shouldn’t be focusing on a white expat. Kidman made further headlines when, during the pandemic, she was allowed to skip a mandatory 21-day hotel quarantine. Later, the LA Times reported that a party scene led to a COVID outbreak.

“Gossip columns and paparazzi aren’t something of my world, but I guess that comes with working with a movie star. You can’t believe everything you read, right?“ – Nicole Kidman

However, I bring up the online rumours from 2021 that Kidman and Wang were spotted arguing in public, and that Kidman walked out on the production – Amazon, at the time, insisted that Kidman “wrapped as scheduled”. “I don’t have much to say about it,” says Wang, calmly. “That’s all news to me. Gossip columns and paparazzi aren’t something of my world, but I guess that comes with working with a movie star.” She laughs. “You can’t believe everything you read, right?”

According to Wang, each episode was written with its own distinctive identity. While episode one establishes a thriller-y, mystery tone, episode two fills in the gaps and explains Mercy’s connection with Margaret. “The entirety of episode four is handheld, to feel the claustrophobia,” says Wang. “It’s a bottle episode. Everyone is trapped in some way. Then episode five is a different kind of bottle episode, but we open it up. It’s a tableaux of the city with wider lenses to capture the landscape of these people.”

When reading Lee’s novel, Wang highlighted the passages she was desperate to film. One is a flashback to Mercy, in her younger years, swimming underneath a yacht as a dare, then struggling to make her way back to air. “One of my favourite scenes is in episode three when Margaret accosts a guy, thinking he works there,” says Wang. “In normal circumstances, she’s incredibly aware, and tries not to behave like an expat. But in her grief, her considerations go out the window, and she does a slightly racist thing. She’s horrified with herself. That’s from the novel.”

Also noticeable is how, in episode six, there are numerous dialogue scenes in which the characters speak straight into the camera lens. “There’s a dreamlike feeling to it, and it transcends time and space,” says Wang. “You’re not sure who’s talking to who, where, and when. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re all talking to each other. That portraiture is a way of doing a visual voiceover.”

With Wang remarking that her next project will definitely be a feature, I ask if Expats has changed her as a filmmaker. “I think so,” she says. “From a stamina perspective, it’s incredibly challenging to direct so many episodes, and to try to stay creative every single day for that long. After having been on set for 100-plus days, I’m much more confident as a director.”

Expats will premiere on Prime Video on January 26