The Sympathizer Co-Creator Don McKellar On The Key To Adapting Pulitzer-Winning Novel For HBO

Summary Don McKellar tackles a new project with The Sympathizer, bringing his creative talents to the TV sphere with renowned director Park Chan-wook.

The Sympathizer delves deep into a complex narrative, capturing the essence of the source material's Hollywood satire and war drama.

McKellar navigates challenges in adapting the novel, particularly in capturing the voice of the Captain through a unique narrative device.

Multihyphenate Don McKellar is tackling his biggest project to date with The Sympathizer. The Canadian creative first found success as an actor in everything from the David Cronenberg-helmed eXistenZ to the Samuel L. Jackson-starring The Red Violin, which he also penned. McKellar went on to find further acclaim behind the camera with the 1998 apocalyptic black dramedy Last Night, which he wrote and directed and won him the Cannes "Award of the Youth" trophy.

With The Sympathizer, McKellar makes his return as a creator/showrunner in the TV sphere, having previously co-created and directed the Canadian sitcom, Michael: Every Day. McKellar shares the creator/showrunner position with acclaimed South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, who also holds previous TV experience, having directed the entirety of the BBC's The Little Drummer Girl miniseries adaptation.

Related The Sympathizer Episode 1 Recap: 8 Biggest Reveals The new A24 & HBO miniseries The Sympathizer begins months before the Fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War and introduces its mole protagonist.

Based on Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, the HBO thriller revolves around a North Vietnamese spy who begins to question his allegiances after escaping to America at the end of the Vietnam War, but still being tasked with completing his mission of working within the South Vietnamese army. Hoa Xuande leads the ensemble Sympathizer cast as the Captain alongside Robert Downey Jr. in a four-character role, Sandra Oh, Fred Nguyen Khan, Duy Nguyễn, Phanxinê, Kieu Chinh, Vy Le, Ky Duyen, Toan Le, VyVy Nguyen and Alan Trong.

In anticipation of the show's premiere, Screen Rant participated in a roundtable interview with co-creator Don McKellar to discuss The Sympathizer, his approach to adapting Nguyen's novel, his collaboration with the author himself, and the challenge of nailing the Captain's voice in the show's narration.

McKellar Thought An "Outsider" Perspective Tied In To The Sympathizer's Story

Unlike the majority of his collaborators on the show, McKellar is one of the few non-Asian creatives leading the charge for The Sympathizer, a story squarely set in the Vietnamese experience. But while the possibility of being an outsider could've hurt some stories, the co-creator ultimately found it tied in very well with the source material's themes, noting Nguyen's own support of the show being an "international story":

Don McKellar: I certainly didn't think I would cover the language. I didn't make any attempts to do that. The show is an international story, and many of us are outsiders, but it starts with Viet's book, and it starts with his central conception of presenting the Vietnam War to Americans to outsiders from the perspective of the people who suffered the most, and who bore the scars of it. So, Viet was very aware that it's an international story, and it has a message for the world, but the Vietnam community's the heart, and we did our best to bring them in at every level. And to listen to them, particularly our cast, who immediately, as soon as we met them, had such real, in-depth knowledge, and experience, and family histories which directly connected to the events of this story. So, we did everything we could to allow them to own it, and I feel they did. We never claimed to be telling our story, we saw ourselves as this two-sided showrunner, one Asian, one Occidental. One of us had a country that was in the war, one of us wasn't. And from that perspective, we thought we could allow a similar distance on the war itself after 50 years, to stand back. And it was time for some outside perspectives to allow that conversation to get to a different level.

The Sympathizer's Multiple Genres Led McKellar To "Double Down" On Its Complex Narrative

As Nguyen's novel bounces between Hollywood satire to powerful war drama, McKellar recognized he was facing a "very complex narrative" to bring The Sympathizer to life on screen. Ultimately, he and Director Park found the best way to translate the book was to "keep that multiplicity of narrative devices", believing the source was just as much about "telling stories" as it was about the deeper thematics of the Vietnam War:

Don McKellar: Yeah, well, that's it. You're absolutely right, it's a very complex narrative, and in fact, we almost wanted to double down on that. And Chan-wook really wanted to keep that multiplicity of narrative devices, storytelling devices, because in a way, it's about telling stories. It's about telling history, the lead, the protagonist, is literally writing down the story under duress. He's, by his circumstances, definitely unreliable. It's very subjective, and that's, of course, the point of how it's impossible to get beyond that subjectivity when you're telling a story like this. So, that's also what gives it the playfulness. I think all of our early work especially was finding a visual equivalent for keeping the playful tone of the book, keeping the sort of wit and subversion of the book, the irony, and not just layering it on with an oppressive voiceover on top of the whole thing, but imbuing it in the actual storytelling in the way we envision characters coming to life in his imagination. That's why we were so lucky to have Park Chan-wook, because his style does have that intelligence.

One Of The Biggest Challenges For McKellar Was "How To Approximate" The Captain's Voice

With the show largely playing out as the Captain writing out a full debriefing of his multi-year undercover work to his warden in a South Vietnam prison camp, his voice is the driving force of The Sympathizer's story, including narrating and twisting the timeline of the whole show. McKellar recognized that one of the biggest challenges in adapting the novel was "how to approximate" the character's voice, though found one device ultimately helped them land on how to make it work:

Don McKellar: Yeah, that was one of the challenges was how to approximate the voice. Viet said right from the beginning, they thought that the voice was the reason for the success of the book. He's a bit of a raconteur, it's a bit unreliable, and we wanted to evoke that. One of the ways was to make an interrogation. So, it comes out through interrogation, which means, by its very nature, it's unreliable, just like torture victims' confessions are unusable in a court of law. And I think that early on, we made this allegorically to film, because the book loves film. People know the Vietnam War, think they know it through the images on film, and American film more than any other war in a way. And the book is about that, too, and how we have our preconceptions based on movies. And it's one of the Captain's love, it's one of the reasons he's split. He's a Communist, but he has a deep embrace of American popular culture, so we thought that, as a narrative device, as a storytelling device, we like the idea of, like an old Steenbeck, he's shaping it like a movie. He's editing, he's rewinding, and it just reminds us that it's one version of this story. One subjective version.

Downey Jr.'s Multi-Role Performance Actually Came From Director Park

Custom Image by Cesar Garcia

Much of The Sympathizer's ensemble roster of characters is essential to the Captain's wavering loyalties and evolving story, though one of the biggest players in that inner tug-of-war is Robert Downey Jr.'s four different characters. McKellar recalls that the decision to cast the Oscar winner as the different personalities came from landing on the theme of how they each represent not only a corner of the Captain's life but also his perspective of America:

Don McKellar: Yeah, we have an amazing cast that I adore, and they were the most fun cast. We have Robert, Sandra Oh, everyone else is Vietnamese, as you know. Robert was there to, in a way, represent America, the American establishment. When we were talking about the book, we realized that there is a recurrent motif almost of these characters that have a similar place in the Captain's life through these benign — or at least they present themselves as benign — characters who offer opportunities, but they're unreliable. Sometimes they're duplicitous, they're sort of patronizing establishment figures, who may be ideologically opposed, but share a common interest and are a part of the same club, in a way, as we showed in episode 3. So Chan-wook had the idea, "Let's cast one actor to play to make that point, and to allow viewers to see their connection, without having to underscore it with sort of expositional dialogue." And it also is, again, a playful idea that allows the viewers to enjoy the satire and to, again, see it from the Captain's perspective, because it psychologically suggests that he's seeing the commonality between all these divergent characters. And then, we cast Robert, who was at the top of our list, and he dove right in, and he was so committed. So serious about differentiating the characters, but at the same time, not going too far in not just making them caricatures, to make them extravagant creations, but still grounded and real. And he was a joy to work with.

About The Sympathizer

Based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, THE SYMPATHIZER is an espionage thriller and cross-culture satire about the struggles of a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist spy during the final days of the Vietnam War and his new life as a refugee in Los Angeles, where he learns that his spying days aren't over.

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New episodes of The Sympathizer air Sundays on HBO and Max.