Byron Wu Talks Making All-Asian Action Comedy – Deadline

What would you do if you discovered that your once-ordinary life was built on the foundation of one of Taiwan’s largest (and successful) organized crime families? Netflix‘s crime comedy The Brothers Sun runs the gamut and the streets of the San Gabriel Valley for answers. Co-created by Byron Wu and Brad Falchuk, the eight-episode series follows the Sun family matriarch, Eileen Sun (Michelle Yeoh), who, after falling in love with a “country boy,” became second in command to one of the most lucrative and dangerous gangster businesses in Taiwan. Because of the potential threats on her family, she decides to spare her youngest son, Bruce (Sam Song Li), from the violent family business and moves with him to Los Angeles while leaving her older son, Charles (Justin Chien), back in Taiwan with his father (Johnny Kou) who turned him into a cutthroat assassin.

Here, Wu speaks with Deadline about the writing process, finding his leading cast and the importance of crafting a relatable all-Asian story on screen.

DEADLINE: Congrats on your first major project coming to screen. I’ve come to understand that you have a degree in physics, right? So, you didn’t go through the traditional route of film school or any of that until later. Can you talk a bit about your origin story and what got you into film and TV? 

BYRON WU: I always loved comedy. I did sketch comedy in high school. I did improv comedy in college. And my parents didn’t really understand what that was or what I could do with it. I didn’t really know what I could do with it either at the time. So, I was pursuing computer science and physics. And I was in a class [about] data structures and algorithms, and it was like the third lecture of the semester. And I had my notes pulled up; it was just a blank sheet of paper. The first two hours had just completely gone in one ear and out the other. And I don’t know why, but I just typed EXT. OFFICE – DAY, and I just started to write what I thought would be a screenplay. I would show up to a lecture and write, and by the end of the class, I had a barely passing grade, but I had written a half-hour pilot.

That was my first foray into it. Then, I just kept writing and trying to film short films in college. And I ended up doing a storytelling and animation class, which was part of the computer science program. And that introduced me to how Pixar tells stories. And I started to see that there’s some formula and structure to story, which speaks to sort of that math part of my brain, and I started to see because physics is basically you take a bunch of known variables, and you solve for unknown variables. You know what certain things are, what you’re aiming for, or what you think will happen, and then you are just putting together the pieces. And that’s how I see story as well. I see that I have certain elements that I know I want, certain elements I’m trying to hit, certain tones, certain story points, and then, it’s just about finding what makes sense, what logic would make sense within our worlds, to fit that all together.

DEADLINE: Then you went to AFI Conservatory to get your MFA? What happened there that led you to make The Brothers Sun? 

WU: The experience was amazing. Before AFI, I was just writing broad, half-hour sitcoms, things like How I Met Your Mother, and those kinds of basic ideas because that’s what I thought would get me a job. And then at AFI, they were like, “OK, forget all that. If you could write whatever you wanted, this is your two-and-a-half years. You’re basically paying for this amount of time, so write whatever the hell you want.” And that’s when I found a lot more of myself and this weird tone that I think you’ll see in The Brothers Sun. It’s something that got me interested in film in the first place. My favorite filmmakers are these guys like [Akira] Kurosawa and Juzo Itami, director Bong [Joon-ho] and Park Chan-wook. They all swing from comedy to drama to action all the time, and that’s the zone that I love. I just think it’s so amazing, and it’s where I got to experiment in and learn and grow at AFI.

DEADLINE: How long were you workshopping The Brothers Sun and then finding it in the hands of Brad Falchuk? 

WU: I originally conceived it between my first and second year at AFI. Then I sent it to Mikkel Bondesen, who was at Brad’s company, at the end of 2019. I developed it with them for a few months, then the pandemic happened, and I hadn’t heard from them [in a while]. Then, all of a sudden, I got an email from a development executive saying, “Hey, Mikkel pitched your idea to Brad in our staff meeting. Can you send us your latest pilot and a series bible?” And I was like, “I don’t have a Series Bible. Give me three days.” I typed something up and sent it to him, and then I was on Zoom with Brad a few days later, where he was like, “Yeah, let’s do this thing.” It was crazy, a crazy ride.

DEADLINE: This is a primarily all-Asian cast and crew behind the scenes, correct? That’s pretty monumental. And, naturally, there’s so many culturally relevant jokes baked into the show, from the Mahjong Aunties, Asians exercising in public, Charles (Justin Chien) and Mama (Michelle Yeoh) fighting over usage of the air conditioning, and, of course, Bruce’s (Sam Song Li) school grades. Were there any jokes or representations you had to particularly fight for? How did you navigate this experience? 

WU: Our writer’s room was all Asian, except for Brad. Both of our directors [Kevin Tancharoen and Viet Nguyen] were Asian. We had a number of department heads that were also Asian American. There weren’t any [references] that we really had to fight for. It was such a natural part of the process, where things would come out, and someone would just bring up being like, “Hey, did your parents ever fight with you in the car about turning on the air conditioning?” We’re like, “Yeah, we know what that feels like.” So, what’s great about it is that it’s a collective; many of us are sharing that same experience. And, I mean, a lot of the writers in our room had never been in a writer’s room with other Asian Americans before. And so, when we talked about these things, it was great to see what little moments we were like, “Oh yeah, my parents did that,” or “Oh yeah, all my friends’ parents also did this thing.” And so, if we felt one of those, that’s going in the show, so it was natural to just put all that stuff in.

DEADLINE: You talked a little bit about your interest in blending genres. The Brothers Sun is a great byproduct of that as it slips from melodrama to pure comedy to drama to action. How did you go about that? 

WU: We wanted to pull from a lot of things that we loved. We love comedy, action, drama, and mystery assailants [type stories], and we wanted to do all of those things. And the show just felt like it had space for it. From the pilot, I really wanted to do a dark-action comedy. I had seen so many great shows that were pushing the boundaries of genre, especially in the half-hour to an-hour space, like Barry and Killing Eve and BoJack Horseman, Get Shorty. These shows were doing something that I thought was so tremendous that they were doing things that were generally reserved for movies. And I felt like I wanted to do that, Brad wanted to do that, so we just did it. And it was just a matter of feel. So much of the time, it was like, does this joke work? And then we had to see it on its feet on set and be like, “All right, it does work,” or sometimes it wouldn’t, and we’d have to adjust and things like that. But it was really just, I hope it works, I hope people respond to it and like it, because to us, we felt like it did, and that’s all we could really base it on.

DEADLINE: Let’s get into building the two brothers, Bruce and Charles. When did you figure out who was who? Was there a thought that maybe this story originally should focus on one child? 

WU: Yes. I think at the very origins, and this was way before Brad came on, I think he would’ve hated the show if he had seen any other earlier version of it. It was just Bruce and TK [Lee Joon], funny enough, because it was such a story about these insecure, goofball Asian-American characters that I wanted to tell a story about. Then, I started to think more about whether there was some statement about Asian American masculinity, and I quickly realized I needed a counterpoint, which became Charles, the older brother. And then it became more focused about these two brothers, but the show didn’t really take off until Mama Sun came into play and became a character, and that’s when it started to make more sense. And after that is when, like, even then, it was still just a group of characters in a world because I knew it was this, and it was somewhat of a tone, but it didn’t become a TV show until Brad came along and helped make it that.

DEADLINE: Which of the brothers are you most like? 

WU: I see myself in both characters. I’m a goofball like Bruce’s, you know, I did improv, I pursued my own personal goals, but I also feel the thing that Charles feels, which is like I’m very devoted to my family, I do a lot of things like my family is very important to me. And then, I also can be a very serious person, so there really are both sides of it.

DEADLINE: Outside of the family dynamic, a lot of this is also centered around the inner workings of several triad factions. What does that research look like? And blink twice if you’re OK. 

WU: There are a few books out there [about the triads]. But my original inspiration was that I was reading about one of my favorite filmmakers, Juzo Itami, a comedy director in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He did these movies like Tampopo … he did this movie about the yakuza, and after it premiered, he went back to his apartment, and these yakuza guys were there waiting for him. And they beat him up, and they cut his face, and they’re like, “Don’t you dare make another movie making fun of the yakuza ever again.” And I thought it was so funny that these guys were so insecure about their jobs as gangsters that they would beat up a comedy director, like what a crazy thing to do. So that became Bruce and TK, the original inspirations.

And then, while we were doing research, the end of that story, that Juzo Itami story, is that those yakuza guys ended up killing him. They ended up pushing him off the roof of his building. And so when we were doing research, we were at a certain point where we wanted to make it true, but we wanted to make it feel true as opposed to being factually true because we didn’t want to make it actually about the real, real black societies and triads. We did it to a point where it was correct and felt correct, but not to the point where we would get pushed off the roofs of our buildings. That’s a good line to draw, right? 

DEADLINE: A recurring theme in the show is about finding your own place, going up against family expectations, and creating your own sense of purpose. Bruce, Charles, and Mama are very distinct in what they want from this troubling circumstance that they are in. How did you go about breaking that? 

WU: One of our big themes of the show was duty to self-versus duty to family. Charles is on one end of it, being very, very dutiful to his family, keeping his passions a secret out of service to his family. And then on the other hand, we have Bruce, who is very much pursuing his own goals, pushing what his family needs off to the side. And it’s when those two things come together and come to a head that we see the growth along both of them, right, because Charles pushed his real self, his own passions down so much, he’s missing a part of himself, and then the same with Bruce. And so we really wanted to push them along those paths towards the center of each one, learning something from the other. At the same time, Mama Sun used to be so powerful, and she is doing everything for her family. She also has to learn how to do things for herself, what she deserves, and what she has earned. It’s about her accepting her power and her place.

DEADLINE: How did you all manage to find the Sun family, Justin Chien, Sam Song Li, and Michelle Yeoh? What qualities did they possess to make them fit the roles they played? 

WU: A lot of credit goes to our casting director, Jenny Jue. She worked her tail off for us, I mean really, and she found some really amazing people. I remember our first meeting with her; she talked about how she really wanted to find a bunch of new faces for the show, and that really spoke to me. I feel like, as an Asian American community here in Hollywood, we are still trying to fill out the roster of people, and I really wanted to bring out as many people into giving them their break as much as possible. She found really talented people to come in and do those things.

I mean, Sam and Justin, I remember we had a chemistry read between them, and we were like, “All right, just be brothers. We don’t even need you guys to read the lines. Just hang out for a second.” And they were just so natural that like those, like the moment in the car in episode two when just Charles slaps Bruce in the face with a cell phone, those things just came out because those two guys are literally just like that all the time. They’re so much fun together. They really do just embody the shows, the relationship between those two.

Of course, Michelle’s amazing. We, of course, always thought Michelle would be amazing for Mama Sun. We’d never think she’d be available or want to do it. And then, someone was like, “I mean, we should try, right?” And we’re like, “OK. Yeah, sure, let’s try,” and before I knew it, I was sitting across the table from her, and we were having a discussion. And it was me, Brad, Kevin, Michelle, and her people, and we just got along. We just hung out for three hours, and it went by so fast. She’s such a charming person, great to be around, such a pro, and we’re so stoked that she wanted to do it.

DEADLINE: What’s season two potentially looking like? 

WU: Listen, we’d love to do season two. Let’s hope we get those Netflix numbers going. And for me, I’m just hoping we get season two. This is my first, well I don’t know, show. I think my only other credit on IMDB is like an AFI short film.

DEADLINE: What’s the importance of bringing a show of cultural significance like this to life for you? 

WU: Seeing the excitement on my family’s faces when they got to meet Michelle Yeoh or something was tremendous, but for me, the thing was being able to make it. Being able to make the thing was so much fun, and we got to work with such great people. Justin Yu, our stunt coordinator and choreographer, he did such a great job, and he had so much great energy on set, and his team was so professional and fun to be around. Our camera guys, our prop people, they were all so much, they love the show, and it’s so much fun to be around a project where people are happy and excited to show up every day and to put in the, you know, our hours are, you know how in production the hours are crazy.

But I didn’t want to miss a single moment of it. It was so great. And for me, that’s just what the goal is always: to get back to doing it, getting back to making it. It’s so much fun in the writing process, the production process, post-production. It’s the best time, so I just want to get back to it.

The Brothers Sun is now streaming on Netflix

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]