Over dinner, Sandra Oh recently received a piece of advice from Awkwafina, her costar in last year’s comedy film Quiz Lady: “You’ve got to be really smart with your choices.” They were discussing Oh’s current position as an award-winning star transitioning to a new era of her career, one backed by a certain industry cache. “It can take a real lifetime to reach the point of having the freedom to be discerning,” Oh says on this week’s Little Gold Men. “I take it very seriously.”

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Her role on The Sympathizer, HBO’s galvanizing new limited series, is a prime example. Oh plays Sofia Mori, a secretary in the “Oriental Studies” department of a college resembling UCLA. She meets our conflicted hero, The Captain (Hoa Xuande), a Vietnamese refugee ostensibly working on behalf of a resettled Saigon general who is secretly spying for the communists in North Vietnam. Sofia, who’s Japanese American, and The Captain bond over a barbed sense of humor, a sense of displacement, and a mutual attraction that evolves into a steamy romance.

Oh is one of two major names acting in a supporting role on the show, the other being Robert Downey Jr. (who essentially plays every white male on The Sympathizer). She was surrounded by actors of Vietnamese descent, younger and older, experienced and not, who’d never received an opportunity like this and had barely worked in the US before, if at all. She’d sit with them while cameras weren’t rolling and listen to their stories. She’d make herself available to answer any and all questions about navigating a big-budget Hollywood set. She’d grapple with the story’s complex subject matter, reframing the Vietnam War and its aftermath by critiquing and skewering the American perspective.

For Oh, an actor who broke barriers as a network TV star in the mid-2000s, the experience was eye-opening. “I come from a time where there just weren’t a lot of us who had that opportunity,” Oh says. “To be able to be present and supporting, to see that opportunity coming about, it just makes me emotional.” Indeed, as she notes during our wide-ranging conversation, it’s changing the way she’s thinking about the business—past, present, and future.

Vanity Fair: I’d read that Viet Thanh Nguyen, who wrote the book on which this is based, wanted you for the part. How did that come together on your end?

Sandra Oh: I was very pleased. It was Viet and Director Park. It was their request. Don McKellar, who’s the co-showrunner along with Director Park, is a longtime collaborator of mine. We’re both Canadian. I think this is, I don’t know, the 10th project that we’ve done together. When Viet Thanh Nguyen asked and also Director Park asked, Don just picked up the phone and said, “Meet us for dinner.” I was like, Sure, no problem!

There’s a fascinating forthrightness to Sofia’s sexuality in a way that I found really exciting.

Oh, definitely. In the book, on the page, Sofia Mori is very much a sexually liberated lady. But there’s a little bit of she doth protest too much in her need to identify herself as solely American. That type of assimilation is really coming from a need for survival. Sofia really believes that it’s her own choice at the beginning. As we track her through this series, she starts questioning what her identity is, and if her identity can be more than the defense of claiming, “Just being an American.” That’s eventually explored through her relationship with the Captain. I love that she is a chain-smoking, very independent, sexually-free woman. Also quite of her time. Of that time and before her time.

Was there any particular research you did into that period? I’m curious what you mean by her being of her time.

I think there was a bit of a performative aspect to it, a little bit of really trying on clothing. There was almost a defiance to even the way that I would choose to smoke. The Captain would take her to certain events; what she chooses to wear and how she chooses to present herself, even the body language, there’s a little bit of defiance. It’s very important that Ms. Mori is holding the place of Asian Americans already established in America, while the Captain and the majority of the cast are the Vietnamese refugees who make it here to LA. She’s kind of elbowing her space in the way that she tries to move in her sexuality to say, “Don’t shame me for it.”

I love the way you put that. Defiance is not something I’ve necessarily gotten to see you play too often.

Even though it’s a period piece, Ms. Mori considers herself a very modern and sexual woman, and I’d like to consider myself that as well. I don’t know, maybe I’ve chilled out a little bit more, you know what I mean? [Laughs] Or settled with the things in midlife.

When you started filming on this show, you told The New Yorker that you’ve “never been so clear on how to lend support.” I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you meant by that.

I was thinking about this today. There have been actors in the African-American community who—and they probably don’t even know this, but their words of support have really buoyed me along my career. I wanted to be there in a supportive way for potentially a new community of actors who might be unfamiliar with the scope—and honestly, the union rules. Just what their rights are as an actor and what you can ask for. Almost all the cast members [playing] the Vietnamese characters joined SAG. There are moments where it’s like, “How are they supposed to know” They don’t know, like, you need lunch. Certain things like that, to lend a hand of protection because Hoa had such a huge responsibility on his shoulders that I wanted him to succeed. Sometimes, you don’t know who to approach or who to ask. You don’t know what to ask for.

I wanted to make myself the safest place to be that advocate. That was a real eye-opening and learning process. Learning process in understanding my own career, and one of the things I am here for—how I can lend or help with a puzzle piece in the great puzzle of all of it. What I hope is that the cast was not intimidated to ask me anything. I tried to make myself as welcoming as possible.

I’ve experienced this with Shōgun, too: a lot of actors that certainly I’ve never seen before, that most American audiences at least have never seen before, getting this opportunity to show what they can do.

It’s great because it’s also profoundly satisfying to see a cast being able to fulfill their full potential. Not only that, but it being supported. There are always different ingredients that you really, really need: a great script, a great director, a great cast, and a studio supporting you by bringing it out to the world. And people like yourselves who are like, “Oh no, this is interesting to me. I’m going to choose this to talk about.” We’re all a part of it.

We had our premiere yesterday. I don’t know how many times I’ve been on a carpet for the past 25 years—trying to get onto a carpet, being on a carpet and being completely ignored, to then the growth of it for me. Then to turn around and see on this carpet all the Vietnamese faces. It makes me emotional. I’m actually glad it’s going to be different for them, because I want them to think and feel like this is absolutely normal. I come from a slightly different generation. I don’t know how to talk about that yet. [Laughs]

I felt it in the past with other films. I remember being at the Oscars with Everything [Everywhere All at Once]. I wasn’t at the Oscars with them, but being two rows behind them, witnessing all of it—my head was exploding with so much joy for them all and feeling and understanding for the first time a part of the whole, for me—that it’s not individuals. That’s a feeling that is coming up for me only in the past few years, feeling my part in the whole of it and that feeling being a profoundly satisfying one.

Has that impacted the roles you’re looking for, what you’re saying no to?

Yes, because I feel like I now have the great opportunity of being much more discerning—and understanding there’s a responsibility to be discerning, and where I put the support and energy and my experience behind. I’ve just got to be smarter about this.

There’s a profile of Director Park in The New Yorker, and a central theme of it is this idea of him making films and television that you really have to pay attention to—ones that aren’t for what many consider the current era of consumption, of texting while you’re watching something. There’s a level of detail. How did you observe that on the set?

It is very much Director Park’s style, and his strength, and his standing firm to his vision. You do have to lean in. Honestly, I think that this show should be studied. I’m now on the second round of watching everything. I shot the damn thing. I read the book. It is a dense book, and it is a dense series. It also trips along and it is completely entertaining in its genre. On my second viewing, it then becomes transfixing. All the layers that Director Park and Don have been layering in, I’m catching all the pieces. I don’t mean to say that in an intimidating way. I actually mean to say that in a completely inviting way because I was just like, “Holy wow, what is in here?”

Episode four is an episode pretty focused on Hollywood. Can you talk broadly about that part of the book, that skewering of the industry, and what you thought of it?

I think episode four is brilliant…. Robert playing this auteur, you get references upon references of his own past filmography, of what just his persona in playing the auteur means. I’ve just started talking about this, so forgive me if it feels a little bit rough. There’s so much satire in 104, and there’s so much overt racism in 104. But because of the perspective, which is the Captain’s perspective—myself as an Asian American watching it, I’m not hurt by it. I’m in sight of it. What’s underneath it is so painful because [of what] we’re seeing played out, but in the safety of the Captain’s point of view. We’re seeing played out how Vietnamese people’s voices have been completely obliterated from the Western American telling of the war in Vietnam, and then what has happened with the voice being missing for 50 years. There’s a lot of pain in it, and there’s a lot of high satire in it, and I think it’s just fantastic. I could talk on and on and on.

So you broke out in Grey’s Anatomy, and you’ve talked a lot about the severe limits that came with exploring race and ethnicity in that show. And here you are 20 years later on The Sympathizer, which even now is pretty radical for what American television can do. What do you make of being a part of that kind of evolution?

Gosh, I’ll take your word evolution. You’re right. And God, I’ve been around that long—I can see things have evolved. [Laughs] It is great. I would correct your word “limit,” because it was definitely a choice and a specific choice [on Grey’s Anatomy] that I think was right for the time, that Shonda [Rhimes] and the writers made that was then explored later on. But the show has been on for 20 years. It has evolved as we have evolved. This is another part, another piece in the puzzle. Maybe a step toward the evolution of all points of view being valid and extremely interesting.

One of the best things for me [on The Sympathizer] was sitting in this circle of chairs. In episode three, there’s a scene where almost all of the cast members are gathered. So we’re sitting around the cast chairs, and everyone is just shooting shit. People’s stories: fascinating, deep, rich, very complicated. That’s the difference between the younger generation who are children of refugees or children of immigrants, and then those who came as refugees and immigrants and how their approach to the material and how they are emotionally attached to the material. It’s really worth someone doing a much deeper dive into. There’s a lot to be said. A lot to be told.

This interview has been edited and condensed.