In The Instigators, Hong Chau (COM’01) (from left), Casey Affleck, and Matt Damon go on a wild ride through Boston, weaving through gunfire, explosions, and Boston’s narrow streets. Photo Courtesy of Apple TV+

TV & Film

Oscar-Nominated Actor Hong Chau (COM’01) Stars in New Action-Comedy The Instigators

Alum and costars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck rip through Boston, evading police and the mob

Oscar-nominated actor Hong Chau lived in Boston as a BU undergrad, so she fully grasps how surreal it is to film a car chase through the Back Bay’s narrow streets and on the pedestrian-only area of the Esplanade. But in her new buddy comedy, The Instigators, which opened in theaters August 1 and begins streaming on Apple TV+ August 9, Chau (COM’01) plays a therapist who, against her better judgment, joins a patient on the lam after his heist goes wrong. Imagine a cross between a poor man’s Ocean’s 11 and the Boston-centric films The Departed and The Town.

Chau says the gates to the city were opened, thanks to the film’s two stars, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (who also cowrote the movie). “We were given such access because Matt and Casey are so beloved in the city,” says Chau, perhaps best known for her role in the 2022 film The Whale. Fans didn’t hesitate to show their love. Shooting scenes outside a bar in nearby Quincy was “kind of difficult,” she says, laughing. “People kept driving by and honking their horns and going, ‘Hey, Matt, Casey, how do you like them apples? We love you!’ and all that. It felt like going to another country, but being invited by royalty. It felt really special.”

Damon—who’d worked with Chau on the 2017 movie Downsizing— suggested Chau for the role of Donna Rivera, a sharp-witted, no-nonsense VA therapist who counsels his character, Rory, a desperate divorced father trying to raise money fast to pay for lapsed child support and alimony. He reluctantly pairs with ex-con Cobby (Affleck) and the two botch a Robin Hood–type mission: robbing the corrupt mayor of Boston, who has piles of illicit cash squirreled away. Rivera tells them to take her as their hostage so she can continue counseling Rory, and she comes along as they scramble to evade the police and the mob in hot pursuit.

Damon says her new role is complicated. “You have to believe that she’s a psychiatrist and good at her job,” he says in The Instigators’ publicity materials. “You also have to believe that she would get in a car with two fugitives for a high-speed chase.”

Chau (just returned from England, where the filming of the live-action comedy Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Movie, costarring Hugh Jackman and Emma Thompson, was wrapped up) was in Boston recently doing press interviews for The Instigators when she spoke to Bostonia.

Finding Her Way

Chau was born in a Thailand refugee camp to Vietnamese parents. (Her mother was pregnant with her when the family escaped Vietnam by boat in the darkness; her father was shot at and bloodied.) She was still young when her family left the camp and moved to New Orleans. Her parents ran a convenience store, and she attended BU with the help of Pell Grants.

She made her one campus visit in the spring—“the most beautiful day ever”—which didn’t exactly represent the weather she would face the other nine months of the year. “That completely threw me for a loop once the winter came,” she says. “It was a cold that I had never experienced before. I was not prepared for that at all.”

At the College of Communication, Chau helped friends with their student-produced films and enrolled in improv classes to overcome shyness. Her improv teacher encouraged her to audition for screen roles, and she took the advice. She kicked off her acting career with minor roles in TV shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and How I Met Your Mother. She appeared in the HBO series Treme around 2011 and landed her first major film role in 2014’s Inherent Vice. Three years later, she was cast opposite Damon in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, about people who choose to be shrunk to avoid the high cost of living and to save the planet. She played a Vietnamese amputee and political activist, a breakout role that earned her Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) best-supporting actress nominations. 

Major projects followed—HBO’s Big Little Lies and Watchmen, the Netflix limited series The Night Agent, and the dark comedy The Menu (she plays the menacing maître d’ opposite Ralph Fiennes). 

Then Chau’s agent sent her the script for The Whale. At first, she passed—she had an eight-week-old baby and COVID was raging—but changed her mind when she heard The Whale’s team was very interested in seeing her audition. She won the part of Liz, the sympathetic and at times enabling friend of Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a morbidly obese professor who hopes to reunite with his estranged daughter. For her supporting role, Chau was nominated for an Oscar and for SAG and BAFTA awards. 

Chau says that her friends and family were thrilled by this recognition. “The fact that it meant so much to them made it more meaningful for me, because I’m a little bashful and I can’t take a compliment,” she says. 

“An Academy Award nomination is the hugest compliment you can get from your peers and artists who are the best at what they do. And that was kind of hard to take in initially. It took a while for it to sink in.”

Riffing Off Matt and Casey

The Instigators, the second film produced by Damon and Ben Affleck’s recently formed company, Artists Equity, has a stacked cast that includes Michael Stuhlbarg, Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina, Jack Harlow, and Ron Perlman. Some scenes were filmed in familiar locations, like Fenway Park and the North End. Others were shot inside and around Boston City Hall, with dozens of fire trucks and police vehicles and hundreds of background actors and stunt performers.

The movie was a departure for Chau. “I’m not your typical action heroine,” she says. “I never pictured myself wanting to do an action movie. I guess I had the misconception that they were kind of boring to shoot because the actors were just sitting there and having to [wait for] a big action sequence, [without] a lot of acting involved.”

But that wasn’t the case in this film. Director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) was more interested in the characters than the action, she says, and his attitude trickled down to the rest of the production crew. 

She worked with Liman and the writers to flesh out her character, imagining who Rivera was outside of work even though there wasn’t time for the movie to get into her backstory. “We should see glimpses and clues as to who she is, [which] helps the audience believe why she makes the choices that she does,” Chau says. “She’s tough, she can handle herself, she can give it right back to [people]. So I wanted to layer that in there.”

Affleck says in the film’s production notes that Chau became the anchor when she joined the mix: “She has a great sense of humor: dry, really subtle and very realistic. She was the perfect foil for the two chuckleheads opposite her.”

Chau says Damon and Affleck—who grew up together in Cambridge, Mass.—went off-script quite a bit while filming. That meant she had to be flexible, calling on her background in improv. 

“It kind of felt like the script was never set,” she says, “like we were working off of a very detailed blueprint but we could add different flavors, given the setting or whatever somebody else was doing at that time. And that was so unusual, because with a big-budget action movie, everything [is] meticulously laid out.”

She adds that for the tight 36-day shoot, director of photography Henry Braham relied mainly on natural light, so they didn’t have to slow down and move light stands around. “We [could] shoot things on the fly, and so I think for that reason the dialogue also had to keep up and feel like it was very alive and being done on the fly as well,” she says. “All of the elements work together really well. And I think that’s why the movie, even though it’s in this genre that we’re all very familiar with, feels very fresh.”

While reflecting on her experience filming The Instigators, Chau explains why she was so happy to return to Boston. It’s where she attended college, and it’s where she met her husband, who grew up in New Hampshire. “I feel like Boston is a second hometown to me, after New Orleans,” she says. “It’s always with me wherever I go. And I feel very close to it. Boston plays a big part in my life.”