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During the warmer months, the acclaimed performer positioned herself behind a speaker's stand at a graduation ceremony in the Granite State, set to deliver university-leavers inspiring thoughts during a era of ongoing challenges. She rose to the challenge, sharing honestly her previous struggles with depression and anxiety, before making a sincere argument for accepting awkwardness and goodwill “so we can confront meanness again and again and not {lose our humanity|sacrifice our compassion|forfeit our empathy”. This grew more vital, she noted, when many world leaders “assert dominance through intimidation and suppression”.

“I was very, very, very nervous about it,” says Oh. “I worked really hard.” She placed herself into the perspective of recent graduates not just anxious over their own futures but about the larger picture. “Globally, we face emergencies!” she notes, considering their worries. “Battles rage globally! I feel deeply burdened, so all I’m going to do is absorb pessimistic media.” But, importantly, Oh wanted her audience to find their way to happiness – thus the celebration. “Remaining still while enduring the pain in the world,” she says, succinctly expressing the outlook she shared that day, “will help you understand how to live fully.”

Currently, you can find T-shirts featuring the words Oh famously said at the Emmys: ‘It’s an honour just to be Asian’

The presentation – with its honesty and kindness, its awareness of the world’s unkindness while still finding moments of joy – feels distinctly fitting for Oh. A native of the region around Ottawa to parents who emigrated from Korea, the actor, whose star turns in the long-running series and the spy thriller made her the initial performer of Asian descent to win numerous accolades, has since built a following for her dedicated promotion of wider representation in the industry.

Engaging and vibrant, her own speech today is filled with plenty of amusement. “Hold on baby!” is the opening line one notices as she talks over the phone from New York, playing for time as she tries and fails to turn on her camera. But Oh soon becomes more introspective, likely to experience lengthy breaks as she talks about everything from the planetary issue to artificial intelligence to racial equality.

Suitably, Oh’s newest venture – the indie Canadian sci-fi film Can I Get a Witness? – is about discovering redemption amid the burning. After an cataclysmic, AI-engineered disaster hits Earth in the very intentionally selected year of the near future, society has been rebuilt. The story fast-forwards: harmony prevails. Traditional workplaces, devices and gadgets are relics of a damned civilisation. Citizens pass their hours tending to their gardens. But there are rules: they stay local, electricity is restricted and – the biggest catch – everyone must experience officially decreed passing at half a century. Oh plays Ellie, a an individual who lived through the event, who is guiding her child into her new job as a “recorder” of these “final chapter” ceremonies. These can be chosen from a booklet, with choices featuring church memorials and oceanside farewells with champagne.

When your primary source of love is the phone, something is happening to you at an unconscious, very significant degree

“I was most interested was the script’s reflection on mortality,” says Oh, in particular how the knowledge of one’s impending death would change one’s outlook on living. It’s an increasingly urgent question, Oh says, recalling an initial showing last year in the California city while blazes spread across the metropolitan area. It highlighted the idea that the film is not really about the future. “This reflects current reality,” she says. “Our world is already aflame.”

When they were making the film, Oh asked creator and scribe the talented filmmaker to include tech themes in the script. How does she think technology is changing our lives? “Phones and social media,” she says, “are reshaping humanity.Whenever your chief affection is the phone, something is happening to you at an deep-seated, very powerful level.”

Her own solution to this shift – “I’m already struggling, and I didn’t grow up with this technology” – is choosing to do “small, profoundly meaningful” films such as this latest one, as well as theatre. She has been playing the role from Twelfth Night in Twelfth Night at the the iconic venue in the urban park. “I’m engaging with 2,000 people in an outdoor venue. It's palpable people really want to attend the performance to find joy, have a good time, for it to be uplifting, out in the outdoors. Audiences gather together and you’re connecting – through the Bard's works.” In the digital epoch, “such true human interactions become way more important”.

She often reflects about making conscious choices, engaged options. “One benefit of getting older,” says the actor, who has just turned fifty-four. “Numerous elements in society, in society, that you’ve been experiencing passively. But you see that glimmer of hope coming through – and realise that’s what you want to follow. I think that’s what midlife is about. And it’s very fascinating.”

She has addressed about rejecting prejudiced ideas she took in from her youth, recalling a painful incident with an representative when she came to Hollywood in the mid-nineties. The agent advised her to head back north as there weren’t any opportunities for artists with her background in the US. Years after, on receiving the Killing Eve script, Oh couldn’t work out which lesser character was intended for her. “Honey,” her agent said. “It’s Eve.”

Over the past period, Oh has put her considerable heft into narratives about overseas communities, acting in the animated hit Turning Red, the thriller Umma, and the humorous project the entertaining feature. She’s also played secretary Sofia Mori in period piece The Sympathiser and the stressed professor in digital production the campus comedy. These characters, unlike the ones that made her famous, explicitly include her character’s heritage in the script.

“I reflect on the ceremony when the groundbreaking film took home top honors,” she says. “It meant a great deal. For progress to occur, you need a broader network – to make headway, to acquire knowledge, to know how to help one another. Early in my career, actors like Daniel Dae Kim or John Cho – we’d known each other for ever, but we rarely appeared on a production or project, because we were always on our own. Hollywood continues to be difficult, leaning into, honestly, a traditional male-dominated system.”

Variety, justice and integration may be {under attack|