Ali Ahn never expected to be doing one of the most important auditions of her career from the galley of a sailboat. The actress was at home for a few days in the midst of shooting “The Diplomat,” the hit Netflix show on which she plays Eidra Park, when she learned of an audition for a spinoff of “WandaVision.”
“It was one of those things where I was leaving that day and I kind of threw it together thinking, ‘I’m never going to get this job.’ It was so far, and in that way I was really relaxed — I was just like, ‘I’m not going to get it, it doesn’t matter,’” Ahn says.
With that, she promptly left for a very “not glamorous” camping trip via sailboat with a friend and a group of strangers.
“I remember thinking, ‘watch me get a callback while I’m on this fricking camping trip,’” she says. Sure enough, the callback came as they were out at sea.
“I’m out in the middle of the sea, and everyone that I’m on this boat with, we’re in tight quarters, no one is an actor, I have no makeup with me, and they’re sending me new material. And I had to basically ask these people [to help],’” she says. “I put my iPhone on a wine box, and they had to hold it, and I was shooting it in the galley of this boat. It was just crazy.”
At this point, she still knew very little of what the mysterious Disney+ Marvel project entailed, only that she was being asked to shoot a post-battle scene (which ultimately didn’t make it into the series), and that the audition would be seen by Jac Schaeffer, the show’s creator.
“I just remember being like, ‘this is mortifying that this is my first time meeting this person,’” Ahn recalls. “I have to do this battle scene by myself. It’s humiliating as an actor to be shooting a battle scene by yourself. But thank god, this scene that I had to shoot on the boat was a post-battle scene, so the fact that I was sweaty and had no makeup on…