WWhen author Viet Thanh Nguyen was growing up in California as a refugee from the Vietnam War, depictions of that conflict were omnipresent in American culture. Section, Apocalypse now, Full Metal Jacket, and many other films depict American heroes fighting their way through a dystopian backwater, then dealing with the psychic toll of defeat at home. Very few of these films have given much thought to the experiences of the Vietnamese, who themselves refer to the conflict as an American war.
It has been 51 years since the last American combat troops left Vietnam. Nguyen now teaches a course on the war at the University of Southern California and finds that most of his students born after 2000 have not seen these films. But their perspective and themes remain in the air, irrevocably shaping collective memory. “Hollywood has so radically shaped the world’s understanding of this war and its aftermath,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen offered a counter-narrative with The sympathizer, his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 novel that follows a North Vietnamese spy during and after the war. Now that book is getting the Hollywood treatment, a miniseries adaptation airing on HBO on April 14. The A24 production features a mix of big stars, including Robert Downey Jr., Sandra Oh and John Cho, and newcomers of Vietnamese descent, including Hoa Xuande in the title role. Nguyen, executive producer, and the creative team hope the series will force viewers to focus on the Vietnamese perspective of the conflict while rethinking core American myths, including how the country still wields geopolitical power today in a fractured world. “Everything the United States was doing in 1975 is still happening today,” Nguyen says.
The sympathizer tells the story of a half-Vietnamese, half-French communist agent who infiltrates the South Vietnamese army and then settles in California after the war, in the hope of detecting plots brewing in his native country. The novel could hardly have been better received: it won the Pulitzer for fiction and landed on more than 30 best of 2015 lists for its biting wit and ambitious shifts in tone, from thriller to screenplay to satire. But Nguyen, now 53, had even bigger dreams for his first novel. “A successful novel can sell tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies. But even a bad TV series or a bad movie would reach millions of people,” he says.
Hollywood didn't immediately understand his vision. Nguyen says that during early meetings, producers were concerned about his insistence that the show center around Vietnamese speaking Vietnamese. But the tone has changed after the political unrest of the Trump era and the killings of George Floyd in 2020 and six Asian American women in Atlanta in 2021. “Hollywood liberalism has been called into question,” says Nguyen. “It took a while for people with the ability to do this stuff to catch up.”
The adaptation was further bolstered by the signing of co-showrunner Park Chan-wook, the revered South Korean filmmaker behind Old boy And The servantwho read The sympathizer and understood the connection between this and the history of his own country. Like Vietnam, Korea experienced a proxy war between the United States and the USSR. South Korean soldiers fought alongside the Americans and South Vietnamese in Vietnam. Their involvement in the war spurred an American economic injection that propelled the South Korean economy into the juggernaut it is today.
Nguyen was delighted with Park's involvement, as The sympathizer was inspired by Old boy in its dark and funny exploration of violence, memory and revenge. Park, in turn, recognized a kindred spirit. “The way he used humor in such an absurd and disastrous situation was completely my style,” Park said through a translator.
Nguyen once displayed dark humor on the set of a film within a film that skewers Hollywood's one-dimensional depictions of war. Nguyen was asked to play the role of an unnamed Vietnamese villager who gets blown up by the film's American heroes, a symbol of the casualness with which Hollywood treats mutilated Asian bodies. “I just thought it would be appropriate for the perpetrator to be killed,” Nguyen told me wryly. Instead, he was inserted into the show as a photographer at a party.
The adaptation is quite faithful to the novel. Park and co-showrunner Don McKellar amped up the spy elements, making Xuande's protagonist, referred to only as the Captain, a noir action hero. This change means that while the character is by no means an angel, he is slightly less brutal than in the novel. For example, a scene in which he uses homophobic tactics to force a confession has been modified. “If you do him like Steve McQueen, he will be very charming and sexy,” says McKellar. “It wasn't to soften it. It seemed natural that, in the visual medium, we should lean more into movie star appeal.”
Another key decision Park made was to have several of the white American characters – a congressman, a filmmaker, a professor, a CIA agent – played by a single actor. Park hoped to convey a central conceit to The sympathizer: that imperialist systems of power are intertwined and overlapping. Park's first choice was Robert Downey Jr., who agreed to take on this multi-faceted challenge and serve as executive producer with his wife Susan Downey, under the banner of their production company Team Downey. Downey Jr.'s presence also adds a meta-layer of meaning. Many viewers, especially younger ones, know him better as Iron Man, whom Marvel's Stan Lee considered the “quintessential capitalist”: a billionaire fighting communism and supplying weapons to the U.S. military . Iron Man was first introduced in a 1963 comic book, fighting in Vietnam alongside the Americans against the racist caricature Wong-Chu, the “Red Guerrilla Tyrant.”
But Nguyen and Park point out that The sympathizer is neither pro-North Vietnam nor anti-America. Some of the novel's harsh condemnations are aimed at the Vietnamese government, which has led to obstacles to publishing the book in the country, Nguyen says. McKellar says they tried to film in Vietnam by sending hundreds of letters to the censor board, but did not get permission. (They ended up using Thailand as a substitute.) “I expect that [the Vietnamese government] will be pretty unhappy,” says McKellar.
While The sympathizer sparing no faction of critics, the book and series also harbor clear ideological goals. Nguyen is something of a progressive firebrand on social media and in his public appearances, and makes no secret of his political goals for the series. Chief among them is to challenge audiences to reckon with the global corrosive effects of American power and racism. “There is a general allergy to the idea that literature or art can have a didactic or political function,” he says. “I think it’s wrong.”
Nguyen hopes the show will reveal the war's place in American history and its relevance to conflicts still playing out today. “Americans want to understand their wars as separate things,” says Nguyen. “But if we're talking about these wars in Asia, we're really talking about an extension of the American campaign from its very first colonization to continuing to expand westward, all the way to China. It's all part of the same story.”
This history, Nguyen argues, extends to U.S. support for Israel's prolonged assault on Gaza. In October, a week after Hamas's attack on Israel, Nguyen signed a letter criticizing Israeli retaliation against Gaza. Manhattan's 92NY removed Nguyen from a conference promoting his memoir, A man with two faces. Nguyen says that despite the potential repercussions, he was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., who opposed the Vietnam War and its “murderous Western arrogance” in 1967. Nguyen wrote the foreword to a reprint of this speech this year. “He was a man who extended his principles from the cause of black liberation to the cause of his opposition to American imperialism and what he saw as a racist war in Asia and Vietnam,” said Nguyen. “I see Israel’s war on Gaza as an opportunity for moral and political clarity.”
Nguyen risks drawing the ire of right-wing ideologues who could fire him The sympathizer as the embodiment of a campaign of liberal indoctrination by Hollywood and Hollywood itself, which promised greater representation and creative freedom after 2020 but has become increasingly cautious in a period consolidation of businesses. “I think the show is quite provocative, in a way that's quite unusual in American popular culture,” says McKellar. “I keep wondering if HBO understands exactly the landmines they’re crossing here.”
First of all, The sympathizer aims to succeed as a work of art: thrilling through its random assassination attempts, clandestine romances, and cat-and-mouse games. But Nguyen also hopes it will spark uncomfortable introspection and help shift long-held narratives. “It’s going to be destabilizing,” he said. “But the risk is worth it if it can be a lever to influence the mass understanding of the war and its impact on the Vietnamese people.”
