Everything Everywhere All at Once leads this year’s Oscar nominations with 11, including Best Picture, writing and directing nods for The Daniels, and acting nominations for all four central performances. In one of those nominated roles, Stephanie Hsu turned in two distinct yet intertwined performances. In a movie jam-packed with dazzling visuals and equally stunning performances, Hsu shined in her dual role as a daughter in pain and a supervillain who just wants peace. She makes us feel both Joy and Jobu’s deeply human yearning to connect, to find purpose, and to be nurtured by her mother, whether in a flannel and jeans or some truly otherworldly hair and makeup. By showing us the human in the metaphysical and the heart in the everyday, Hsu gave a performance that earns every accolade.
Who Does Stephanie Hsu Play in 'Everything Everywhere All at Once'?
As its title might indicate, a proper summary of Everything Everywhere All at Once would take up the length of this article, so we’ll stick to the basics: Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is a stressed and dissatisfied wife, mother, daughter, and laundromat proprietor who is disconnected from her own daughter, Joy, and being audited by a hard-nosed IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis). While working through receipts in the fluorescent-lit IRS office, a special Bluetooth headset drags her into a parallel universe where her mild-mannered husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is suddenly a fanny-pack-wielding warrior. He tells her that in his universe, Alpha-Evelyn was a brilliant scientist who found a way to “verse-jump” — entering the bodies and memories of their parallel universe selves and gaining their skills. But Alpha-Evelyn pushed her daughter too hard in verse-jumping training, and her mind splintered. Now that daughter is Jobu Tupaki, an anarchic force that experiences all universes at once and can verse-jump at will — and who wants to make it all stop. She’s created an everything bagel that contains — and could consume — everything in the multiverse. It’s now our Evelyn’s job to stop her.
Stephanie Hsu Is Both the Heart and Threat of the Film
While Yeoh's Evelyn is the protagonist of the movie, Hsu is both its heart and its existential threat. As Joy, she perfectly captures the pain of trying to become your own person in a family that doesn’t have the time or tools to help you do that. In unshowy clothes and undone hair, she seems almost ready to disappear, used to being unseen by her mother and forced into a role she doesn’t want to play. She’s trying, though — she has a girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel), and wants to bring her into the family fold. But Evelyn consistently misrepresents their relationship and disregards Joy’s feelings, widening the chasm between mother and daughter. In this universe, Hsu’s job is a quiet one, finely detailing the everyday hurts and resentments that can snap a bond without a sound. In these naturalistic scenes, both her disappointment and her irrepressible yearning to reconnect are both just below the surface, creating a performance that’s at once reserved and vibrating with barely contained emotion. It’s a beautiful and nuanced depiction of early adulthood and disconnection, which Hsu brings vividly and quietly to life.
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But where Joy has two feet firmly planted on the ground, Jobu flies. As Joy’s multiverse-hopping alter ego, Hsu lets completely loose in a performance that’s a riot of color and unrestrained anger. This contrast between Joy and Jobu’s many iterations makes her turn (turns?) as Jobu even more astonishing than it would be on its own. Hsu uses every tool in her arsenal to bring Jobu to screaming life, including confident physicality and immediate access to the furious inner child that Joy hides but Jobu lives. Hsu’s performance as Jobu is at first terrifying — her violence and nihilism are shocking and, at first, seem like they’re great fun to her. She can turn from depressed Joy to murderous Jobu by simply cocking her head and raising her eyebrow, or by strutting down a hallway in full pink-haired Elvis regalia. But as we get to know Jobu, Hsu’s performance deepens even further by giving us access to the deep pain and hopelessness that drive her candy-colored exploits. She just wants it all to end, and she wants to find the version of her mother, somewhere across the infinite multiverse, who can understand that yearning and support it. By giving us equal access to Jobu’s explosivity and her exhaustion, Hsu builds an indelible villain who maybe, in the end, isn’t a villain at all, but just a lonely kid who needs her mom.
Joy and Jobu Inform Each Other
But while Hsu is stellar in each role separately, what really makes her performance sing is the way her Joy and her Jobu inform one another. The lost daughter is always at the center of Jobu’s internal everything bagel; the rage and chaos that animates Jobu roil Joy’s guts too. And the closer Jobu gets to the world-ending black hole at the center of the everything bagel, the more the two performances begin to collapse in on each other. Hsu gives Jobu's unrestrained grief and rage to Joy as she begs her mother to let her go in the laundromat’s parking lot. She gives Jobu the numbing despair that’s been eating away at Joy as Jobu prepares to find peace in the everything bagel’s nothingness. And she gives both the same core desire: to connect with a mother who can really, truly see her.
All of this adds up to not just a dazzling performance, but the beating heart of a movie that is so much about that terrifying and glorious mother-daughter relationship. For all its wonders, motherhood can be awfully scary — your child goes from a physical part of you to someone distinct but still knowable, and then, sometimes and most frighteningly, to someone you barely recognize. You hope you’ve given this new person, this beloved stranger, the tools to flourish and be a force for good, but what if you end up on the other side of a canyon, unable to reach each other, screaming into the wind? If you push too hard, they may break. If you don’t push enough, they may stay stagnant. Evelyn and Joy are at this impasse; Evelyn wants to do what’s best for Joy but doesn’t know what that is or how to do it. Joy wants her mom to support her for who she is, but doesn’t know how to make her really see. Jobu’s ever-shifting outfits, and her sudden appearances, all speak to the terror of the person you love most becoming unknowable. And because Hsu’s Joy is so quietly vivid, she is always there, just out of reach, inside her Jobu. By giving vibrant life to both the flesh-and-blood daughter and the screaming pain inside her, Hsu’s performance brings the movie’s central metaphor to life and gives it deep emotional resonance.
Michelle Yeoh portrays a difficult mother’s difficult love with shining clarity. But what makes the relationship soar is the equal ache inside Hsu’s Joy and Jobu. We may be in Evelyn’s perspective, but Hsu never lets us forget what her brand of motherhood has cost, in this timeline and every other, as well as how badly she wants to connect despite the past mistakes, hurts, and erasures. At the movie’s climax, as Jobu is preparing to enter the bagel and end the multiverse, Joy is begging her mother through tears to let her go. But Evelyn can now see Joy, really see her, in the way that we in the audience do, and it’s that connection that saves the world. “Of all the places I could be, I just want to be here with you," Evelyn tells her beloved daughter. Because of Hsu’s performance, we do too.
