ComingSoon Senior Editor Brandon Schreur spoke to Ali Wong and Echo Wu about the new Netflix animated series Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld. Wu, who created the series, discussed how personal of a project it was for her, while Wong touched on what made her want to get involved and more.
The synopsis for the series reads, “The series follows Jentry Chau (voiced by Ali Wong), a Chinese-American teen living in a small Texas town, who finds out a demon king is hunting her for the supernatural powers she’s been working her whole life to repress. With the help of her weapons expert great-aunt and a millennia-old jiangshi (Chinese hopping vampire), Jentry must now fight an entire underworld’s worth of monsters while balancing the horrors of high school.”
Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld is out today on Netflix.
Brandon Schreur: Echo, I know you’re the creator of this show. I’m wondering if you can tell me if this was a personal experience for you. Obviously, it has all this fantasy stuff with the underworld and all that, but I was really drawn to this character, her relationship with the Gugu character, and all the stuff about coming to Texas. I’m just wondering if this is at all inspired by things in your own life. How personal was this to make?
Echo Wu: Even in the initial deck, I had said that this is a love letter to my childhood. There are monuments in the show that are just straight out of my hometown, which is Carrollton, Texas. Sometimes the designers will surprise me and they’ll be like, ‘Can we see some pictures of your house?’ And then I look at Gugu’s house and it’s literally the furniture in my own house. It’s like, ‘Oh my god, this is therapy. Therapy exposure.’
It is very true to kind of that experience. I think a really big thing I wanted to portray in this show was that self-identity of feeling — when you live in a place that doesn’t have a lot of people that look like you, how that affects you and the relationships that come with that territory. It really, truly does blend. Life and art kind of imitate each other in that way. It is true for this show.
Sure. And I loved all of those themes in the show, too, seeing how it all plays out — it was really well done how you handled all of that. Ali, I’m curious about how your involvement in the show came to be. I know you’ve done voiceover in stuff like Tuca & Bertie and Big Mouth. What was it about this character, Jentry Chau, that made you want to sign up for this?
Ali Wong: I think it was in 2020 that Echo came to me — and she came so prepared, with a full deck. A lot of the images you see in the show with Gugu and the rings, Kit with the painted skin, and Jentry with the fire in her hands; those are almost exactly like what she pitched to me in 2020. She always had a very clear vision.
I’m very drawn to any sort of — and it’s very rare that I see it — but I’m always going to be drawn to a new, fresh voice, a new talent that has such a clear point of view. She presented something to me that was so clearly a beautiful, interesting self-portrait. I didn’t grow up in Texas, this is really her show. You can see that it’s a love letter to Texas, a love letter to her love for anime. These anime and animation [projects] that span into all sorts of different genres within anime. I just loved that she showed up so much in her work, and it’s such beautiful execution from the beginning that I could really trust her to create something beautiful.
Sure, totally. I know, just in voiceover, you’ve done younger characters like this before like in Big Mouth. But is it ever intimidating or scary to have to voice a teenager even though you’re a full-grown adult?
I don’t think so. In so many phases of my life, I’ve been the new kid showing up and feeling like a fish out of water. I don’t think that part of us ever goes away. When you go to, like, a new dinner where you don’t know everybody that well — you’re always going to feel that nervousness and then that sense of accomplishment when you win somebody over or you connect with somebody.
Thanks to Ali Wong and Echo Wu for taking the time to discuss Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld.
