Watchmen star Hong Chau would love to delve deeper into Lady Trieu’s backstory

HBO’s Watchmen airs its season finale this Sunday. The show has been terrific so far, and we can’t wait to see how it wraps up. While we speculate, Regina King (Angela Abar, Sister Night) talked to Entertainment Weekly about how it all began.

“[Showrunner Damon Lindelof] had the script delivered with a lovely note, saying that he sees me as this and would I take this ride with him,” King remembered. “I started reading the pilot and five pages in I was like, ‘Oh, oh, he’s going here? Black Wall Street?’ I had to just sit with that for a second because it had been something that my sister and I, for a long time, had been like, ‘Why hasn’t this story been told?’” An excellent question, that.

King loves that her character, a masked police detective, gets to kick ass on the show. “It is so much fun. I’m waiting until I’m damn near 50 to be a superhero. What?”

EW named King as one of its Entertainers of the Year, by the way. We’d say she’s earned it.

While King and Lindelof had worked together previously on The Leftovers, Hong Chau (Lady Trieu) didn’t know him. She also wasn’t familiar with the Watchmen graphic novel, so she had some homework to do. Lindelof helped. “Damon Lindelof was pleasantly very open, from the get-go,” Chau told Collider. “I met with him about the project, but I didn’t know what the character would be. I didn’t have any familiarity with the Watchmen graphic novel, prior to this, so when I first met Damon, he explained the entire Watchmen graphic novel to me, which took a while and was a lot of information to absorb.”

"I don’t know if I really absorbed all of it, but then he moved on and explained the show that he was making, and how my character, Lady Trieu, fit into that. So, I did know, from the very first meeting, her origin story and where she would end up, at the end of the season."

Lady Trieu was introduced in Episode 4, “If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own,” where she bought a family farm mere moments before something mysterious fell out of the sky and onto her newly purchased land. “That was such a scary scene,” she remembered. “That farmhouse scene in Episode 4 was the very first thing that I shot, and it’s a lot. There was no way to really ease into that, and it was difficult because it wasn’t with any of the other major characters in the show, so I couldn’t really anchor myself to something that somebody else had done, to see where I fit in, or how I could fit in.”

If you’ll recall, that first scene involved Lady Trieu presenting a childless couple with a freshly cloned baby, so when she says she was thrown into things, she means it. “We had a rotating line of babies on hand,” she said. “There were so many babies in the house. We were shooting on location, in a real house that was in the middle of a field. It wasn’t this climate controlled stage, or anything. That was a pretty wild day.”

Watchmen. Hong Chau as Lady Trieu 2. Photo credit: Mark Hill/HBO

With only one episode left, it’s not likely we’ll get Lady Trieu’s full backstory, and Chau would like to delve deeper into the character’s history. “I feel like there’s so much more to explore, with all of the characters, really,” she said. “There’s a whole plot that needs to be serviced, but Damon’s done an incredible job of creating layers and depth and complexities to each of the characters.”

We’re still crossing our fingers for a Watchmen season 2. In the meantime, the finale, “See How They Fly,” airs this Sunday on HBO.

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