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Earlier this year, the celebrated performer took the stage behind a podium at a graduation ceremony in a New England location. Her purpose was to share university-leavers encouraging messages during a period of continuous instability. Stepping up to the occasion, she shared personally about her own previous struggles with depression and anxiety, then made a genuine case for accepting discomfort and kindness. “Enabling us to meet cruelty again and again and not lose our humanity,” she emphasized. This was increasingly important, she noted, when many political authorities “seek control through intimidation and oppression.”

Then came the instant that would capture global attention. She urged everyone to get on their feet and do something her famous character used to do when times got tough. “Dance it out!” she commanded as a popular track filled the crowd. “Remember this feeling!”

“I was very, very, very nervous about it,” she recalls. “I worked really hard.” She had been imagining herself into the mindset of young adults not just anxious about their own prospects but about the larger picture. “Society faces immense challenges!” she says, envisioning their dark thoughts. “Violence is rampant! The weight is overwhelming, leading to endless scrolling.”

But, crucially, she aimed her audience to find their way to happiness – thus the dancing. “Enduring suffering consciously,” she says, neatly summing up the outlook she shared that day, “assists in discovering how to exist meaningfully.”

Currently available T-shirts printed the statement the actress shared at a televised ceremony: ‘I’m proud of my heritage’

The presentation – with its openness and empathy, its consciousness of the world’s hardships while still seeking moments of celebration – feels deeply authentic for the performer. Originating near Canada’s capital to a family of Korean heritage, the actress, whose iconic performances in hit series made her the first Asian woman to win multiple industry accolades, has since built a following for her strong advocacy of wider representation in the industry.

Engaging and lively, the actress’s dialogue is filled with plenty of lightness. “Wait please!” is the opening line heard as she chats by phone from New York, buying a moment as she attempts unsuccessfully to activate her camera. But she soon becomes more introspective, inclined toward lengthy breaks as she discusses everything from the planetary challenges to artificial intelligence to diversity issues.

Relevantly, the actress’s current work – an indie Canadian sci-fi film – is about discovering meaning amid the crisis. After an world-ending, computer-generated disaster hits Earth in the carefully selected year of a coming time, civilization has been rebuilt. It’s 2040: harmony has been established. Corporate spaces, devices and smartphones are artifacts of a damned civilisation. People spend their days cultivating plants. But there are restrictions: they avoid journeys, electricity is restricted and – the central condition – everyone must die a government-mandated death at midlife. The actress embodies an individual who experienced the 2025 catastrophe, who is assisting her child into her new job as a “archivist” of these “conclusion” ceremonies.

Where you seek affection is technology, change is occurring to you at an deep level

“I was most interested in the script’s meditation on death,” says Oh, in particular how the awareness of one’s impending death would change one’s perspective to life. It’s an ever more pressing question, the actress explains, thinking back on an early screening last year while wildfires raged across a urban area. It made clear the idea that the film is not really about the future. “It is what’s happening right now,” she says. “The crisis is ongoing.”

During the production of the project, Oh asked the filmmaker to include tech themes in the script. How does she think digital tools is changing our lives? “Phones and social media,” she says, “are retraining human beings. Once technology replaces human connection, a shift occurs to you at an unconscious level.”

Her own solution to this change – “I’m already struggling, and I didn’t grow up with this technology” – is choosing to do “modest, highly impactful” projects such as this latest one, as well as stage acting. She has been performing a theatrical part in an community space in New York’s Central Park. “I connect with many attendees in an open-air theatre. You can feel people really desire to come to the show to have fun, be entertained, for it to be positive, out in nature. You’re together and you’re connecting – through timeless narratives.” In the age of the technology, “genuine connections become incredibly valuable.”

She frequently discusses making deliberate actions, active decisions. “This is the gift of midlife,” says the actor, who has just turned her fifth decade. “There is so much in society, that you’ve been living in unconsciously. But you see that glimmer of hope coming through – and realise that’s what you want to pursue. I think that’s what midlife is about. And it’s very fulfilling.”

The performer has shared rejecting the bias she accepted from her formative time, highlighting a painful memory with an agent when she first came to a creative center in the 1990s. The figure told her to leave as there existed few roles for Asian actors there. Years after, on reading a career-changing role, she was unsure which supporting part was intended for her. “Honey,” her representative said. “It’s the main character.”

Lately, Oh has put her substantial platform into stories from the global community, participating in family features, genre films, and entertaining features. She’s also played diverse characters in serious projects and university settings. All these roles, unlike the ones that made her famous, directly address her character’s heritage in the script.

“I remember being a prestigious event when a landmark film received top honors,” she says. “The moment mattered. To create change, you need a larger community – to get traction, to develop skills, to know how to work together. When I started, actors like me – we’d crossed paths for ever, but we never shared on a stage or set, because we were always isolated. It’s still a competitive environment, often dominated by, honestly, a {patriarchal white mainstream|traditional power structure|established