Jamie Chung is caught up in sex trafficking. She keeps getting distracted by the thought of the international sex trade. She likens them, the girls, the young women from Taiwan or China who end up working in the massage parlors in her hometown of San Francisco, to the Korean women forced into sexual slavery during WWII.
“It could be me. It could be my little niece. It’s tragic, and they’re stuck, and it’s terrifying,” she says. “It’s great that law enforcement is cutting down on these things. It’s just tragic that the mass population has no idea about it. It’s just disturbing, you know?”
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You might know Chung best from The Real World: San Diego, the 14th season of the MTV party-in-a-reality series that paved the way for Jersey Shore. It’s where she got her first taste of fame. It’s also where anyone who had thirsted, unknowingly, for the sight of an assimilated Asian American in popular culture got a mass media vision of someone familiar.
While on a break from her studies at the University of California, Riverside, Chung lived for three months in a giant house with six strangers. Every day at 4922 North Harbor Drive was rent-free, and when she came back to school, Chung was able to quit her two waitressing jobs, shake off her student loans and get paid to do more Real World-related appearances. It’s not something she regrets, she says—but come on, that was so long ago, all the way back in 2004. Can we just forget about it already? So much has changed since then.
For one thing, she’s an actress now, one who’s got sizable parts in two new big-budget films: Sucker Punch, which came out last month, and The Hangover Part II, which hits theaters in May. She’s also taking a shot at producing and developing her own projects; this is, she believes, the only way to really
shape the kind of career she wants.
Which brings us back to sex trafficking. “Would I like to do a movie that documents the issues, the real-life issues that are happening, like the sex trade or comfort women? Yeah. I’d like to do a movie like that to tell the world what’s going on, you know? Knowledge is power.”
While the San Francisco-born Chung was growing up, her father, a former nightclub manager (“I guess that’s where I get the party genes from”), and her mother, a onetime bank employee, ran a burger restaurant in central North Beach, an Italian district of the city. They encouraged both of their daughters to learn the piano or the violin and to play golf. These things, Chung resisted. Her parents did succeed in sending her to a summer camp called Han Ma Eum, where she met other Korean Americans and tried her hand at acting, performing in skits she and the other kids produced themselves.
She adored those skits and felt joy in performing, but she wouldn’t come back to it until she got the hell out of UCR. Well, almost. Right after she graduated, she panicked.
“I had my mid-20s life crisis as soon as I got out of college,” says Chung, who turned 28 this month. “I had these nightmares and it was stressing me out, and I was like, ‘Well, what do I really want to do? Pursue film. So I think I should just go for it.’”
Chung moved from Riverside to Los Angeles and began living with her then-boyfriend, a producer and manager whose clients were rock stars. It quickly became apparent that, regardless of her genes, Chung couldn’t tolerate the nonstop party rock lifestyle. None of the party barnacles had jobs, she says. They had no responsibilities, no ambition to do anything other than to freeload off her boyfriend. So she moved out.
With no credits to her name apart from reality TV, she found an agent, a fellow Korean American named Sarah Shyn, who has since become her manager.
“She was stunningly gorgeous when I first met her,” Shyn says. “Really hard to take your eyes off of.” (This is probably also how you know Jamie Chung—if not necessarily by name, then by her huge, roundmanga eyes, her brilliantly white and toothy smile. Or perhaps you know her by her covetable body? Surely anyone who’s seen her spreads in Maxim, Stuff or Complex has felt her flirting through the pages.)
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Once Shyn got used to Chung’s physical blessings, she detected promise and motivation. “Her overall vision was clear,” Shyn says. “She wanted to move on from Real World. She wanted to be a serious actor.”
Now that she was out of the party environment, Chung found that getting work came much more easily. She started booking jobs, small parts on Days of Our Lives, Veronica Mars and I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, parts like “Hooters Girl” and “Flirting Girl.” There were periods of doubt, six-month stretches when nothing would happen.
Then, she got her first real break. She nabbed the lead role in the ABC Family miniseries Samurai Girl, based on the young adult book series of the same name. That’s when she finally told her parents she was going to be an actor, that she had landed a starring role in a production that would take her to Vancouver to film. It’s still the thing that she’s most proud of in her career.
Chung found herself back in Vancouver two years later, this time to train for and shoot her part as Amber in Sucker Punch, a dark, action-fantasy film centered around a young girl in the 1950s who is institutionalized and about to be lobotomized. Directed by Zack Snyder of 300 and Watchmen fame, the film—featuring an ensemble female cast—follows the girl’s attempt to escape an asylum with her inmate buds. Chung had first auditioned for the role of Blondie, which went to Vanessa Hudgens. She was heartbroken when she didn’t get the job.
“Absolutely devastated,” Chung says. “I made it so personal. I was moping around. I really felt like I was going through a break-up.”
As luck would have it, three weeks later, Emma Stone, who had originally been cast to play Amber, dropped out of the film, and Chung was asked to audition again. Her team, as she refers to them—and it is literally a group of many people who help handle her career, a movie star affectation that Chung has successfully mastered—tried to prepare her for the possibility of disappointment. They didn’t have to. She got the part.
“It was one of the best moments ever of my life. To be so devastated by not getting a part and getting a second chance at it? That almost never happens. It was a godsend.”
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Wanting to fully embrace the opportunity, Chung went into training with abandon. Her first week there, she did a box jump, landed on her knee and started bleeding. She kept going. It won her the admiration of her castmates, especially Jena Malone. “Minute one, she was one of my compadres,” Malone says. “We had already been training for a couple months, and she walked right in with no fear. She was tough as nails.”
The mostly female cast, who spent much of the training period in gym clothes and drenched in sweat, bonded quickly. They had “cheat nights” every Wednesday, where they would head out to a local restaurant and order every dessert on the menu. They shopped for Halloween costumes together. They helped plan a special birthday when co-star Emily Browning turned 21.
The extracurricular activity lent something real to the chemistry between the actors, and though an Asian patient in a 1950s-era mental institution in Vermont might seem like an anachronistic choice, the filmmakers believe they made the right one with Chung.
“She brought that role to life,” says Steve Shibuya, who co-wrote the screenplay with Snyder. “Jamie gave such a humanity to Amber. I didn’t see that when we were writing it. Jamie brought that.”
From the sisterhood of kick-ass pants, Chung went to a testosterone-heavy set in Thailand to play Stu’s fiancée in the sequel to The Hangover. Playing a Thai American character whose family network brings the wedding to Bangkok, Chung focused more on learning and observing than trying to join thegroup. “With these comedians, you never know. Especially Zach [Galifianakis]. You never know when he’s off; he’s constantly on,” Chung says. “We were listening to music and eating dinner, and he’s like, ‘Oh, it’s Band of Horses!’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I know, I love Band of Horses.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, me too, our band opened for them last summer on their tour.’ And I was like, ‘No frickin’ way! I didn’t know you were in a band!’ He’s like, ‘Eh, I’m not.’ I could never tell when he was joking or not.”
So on her days off, Chung would frolic with the girlfriends of all the male leads. They rented boats, went snorkeling, took jaunts to Phuket. Chung, a sorority sister, knows how to be a girl’s girl, and she does it well.
“Of all the girls, if I were sick, I would want to go over to Jamie’s,” says Malone. “She is a beautiful and wonderful caretaker.”
There’s also something very Korean about the way she does this. When she and her manager were once dining at a restaurant, Chung lied and said that it was Shyn’s birthday so that she could take care of the check. “I have to fight with her to pay meals,” Shyn says. “Most clients expect you to pay for them, automatically.”
“The cultural values that my immigrant parents wanted to instill in my daily life, I pushed away because I just wanted to fit in like everybody else,” Chung says. “I’m kicking myself in the ass because, especially the Korean language and the culture, it’s starting to disappear.”
Luckily, Chung is an actor, and part of her job is to learn new skills. She plans to employ this to satisfy her personal desires.
“Potentially, one day, I would love to do a film in Korean,” she says. “It’s fun to challenge yourself in different ways. That’s the thing I love about acting. It’s kind of wonderful. It’s kind of beautiful.”
by Helin Jung
photographs by Eric Sueyoshi
hair by Kristin Ess makeup by Suzie K styled by Lyndzi Trang (with Jacqueline Nguyen)
shot at Watermarke Tower, Los Angeles
