How do you make a miniseries dramatizing the 19-year war between the U.S. and Vietnam? By recruiting a Canadian and a South Korean to serve as co-showrunners, of course.

That’s how The Sympathizer, a coproduction between Toronto’s Rhombus Media, HBO and A24, came together ahead of its April 14 debut on HBO in the U.S. and Crave in Canada. Toronto’s Don McKellar (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) and Seoul’s Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave) are co-showrunners and executive producers, with Chan-wook directing the first three episodes.

According to Rhombus founder and president Niv Fichman, the best-selling debut novel by Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen first crossed his desk shortly after its 2015 release. Swedish-Vietnamese actor Kim Ly related to the fictional story of a French-Vietnamese communist spy looking back at the Vietnam War and told Fichman he thought it could be a great movie.

Through Ly’s Vietnamese connections, Fichman met with Nguyen. By that time the novel had won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

“Lots of people were trying to get the book,” Fichman tells Playback Daily. “I guess the combination of this young, energetic Vietnamese-Swedish guy and a veteran producer like me, who had some experience adapting substantial books like Blindness, for example, made Nguyen give us the rights.”

Another big piece was when Nguyen named South Korean director Chan-wook as The Sympathizer‘s dream director. Fichman’s long-time Canadian collaborator McKellar had written an unproduced movie with Chan-wook. So he brought him to Fichman’s house on the director’s birthday. Fichman made a tasting menu with “lots of wine,” and Chan-wook agreed to the project under two conditions: that it become a series and McKellar showrun it with him.

Ly boarded as an executive producer, and the team broke down the novel into episodes in conjunction with Nguyen, who vetted changes ahead of time. Once those initial stages were complete, Fichman brought the project to A24. He recalls going out for drinks to celebrate the new partnership the day the world learned that Tom Hanks had COVID-19 in 2020.

Fichman says he initially believed The Sympathizer could have been a natural Canadian-South Korean coproduction. However, since he initially approached it as a film, and the memorandum of understanding between Canada and Korea only includes television, he moved in a different direction. Team Downey (Robert Downey Jr., Susan Downey and Amanda Burrell) boarded as executive producers.

“The project itself is super Canadian because of Don McKellar’s involvement,” says Fichman. On-screen, the series boasts Canadians Fred Nguyen Khan and Duy Nguyen (who are good friends in real life), along with Sandra Oh, whom the author had in mind for the role of Sofia Mori. Oh starred in McKellar’s 1998 film Last Night, and he helped get her on board.

“We realized at some point that we had so many foreigners involved with the show,” says McKellar, adding that lead actor Hoa Xuande, who plays The Captain, is Australian.

“It wasn’t our intention, but there’s something great about that,” he continues. “The book is about Vietnam and America following foreign policy and how it affected this divided community. The international component was really important. It gave us this perspective. The whole idea is to sympathize with the other side and put yourself in their shoes. I do think it helped us.”

Academy Award winner Downey Jr. is the exception, representing the U.S. significantly on screen. He tackles four roles throughout the series, an idea Chan-wook came up with after he and McKellar started breaking down the book.

“We kept talking about how there are these American establishment men who keep recurring in The Captain’s life as sort of mentor, antagonistic characters. They seemed to represent these different pillars of the American establishment — academia, entertainment, intelligence, politics,” says McKellar.

“These patriarchs are all serving each other. It’s not a conspiracy, but they naturally share common interests and ultimately work for the same cause. We thought it was funny for the tone of the series to have the same actor play those parts, and it allowed viewers to appreciate the satire and remind them we’re seeing this all from one character’s point of view,” he continues.

Filming for The Sympathizer took place in Thailand and California. Production applied to film in Vietnam, but, according to Fichman, their applications were neither granted nor denied. (The country has also never published the book.) The producer adds that Thailand offered unnamed financial incentives that “really supported production.”

Fichman initially eyed Toronto for post-production work, but then the team struck a deal with California that resulted in more than $17.4 million in tax credits. Post moved to the U.S. state instead to meet required spending.

“They have great posts in California, but it would have been really amazing to do it here,” adds Fichman.

“I’m sure this show is far more than all the budgets of everything I’ve ever done combined,” says McKellar. “It still came down, as it always does, to me cutting money and budget. I spent months trimming budgets and effects and sets and locations. I remember wondering how that was possible with this budget, but you never escape that. There’s never enough money; it’s amazing.”

“But on the other hand, I got to blow up a lot of stuff and let my imagination run free,” he adds.

Image courtesy of Bell Media