Actor Jimmy O. Yang plays a round of Wild Card and…

A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I first saw Jimmy O. Yang in a Christmas rom-com. It’s my little personal tradition to lock myself in my downstairs guest room and wrap presents while watching the so-bad-they’re-good genre of holiday movies. A few years ago, the streaming algorithm recommended a movie to me called Love Hard. And I’m so glad because I got to watch Jimmy O. Yang cut through the saccharine mush of those movies and deliver the most authentic, maybe even subversive, performance I’d ever seen in a holiday rom-com.

Yang had already made a name for himself as a recurring character on the HBO show Silicon Valley. He was only supposed to be in a few episodes, but the showrunner loved him so much that he made him a central part of the story. It’s happened to him a lot in life: people underestimating him. It comes up in his memoir How to American: An Immigrant’s Guide to Disappointing Your Parents. Yang immigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong when he was 13. Being underestimated also comes up in his stand-up comedy and is a major theme of his new show on Hulu, Interior Chinatown. I, for one, will never underestimate him.