Olivia Munn used to be told she was ”too Asian” when she first started her acting career.
The 34-year-old actress has mixed ethnicity as her mother Kim Schmid is of Chinese descent, and her father Winston Munn is American/European.
Olivia admits she had many knock backs as a young actress, often being deemed unsuitable for roles for Caucasian and Asian women because she is mixed race.
In an interview with Prestige Hong Kong magazine, she said: ”I’d go out for so many auditions, for everything. And then I’d be told, ‘You’re too Asian,’ or, ‘You’re too white.’ I remember someone telling me, ‘Don’t feel bad. One day they won’t be trying to match you to fit with anyone else. You’ll just be hired for you.’ So you can’t help but get frustrated. That’s part of it all. There’s always competition in any business. And all it takes is one role. Not even necessarily a great role. Just one job that makes you feel like you’re a working actor. One job can turn your whole life around.”
Olivia speaks fluent Japanese after being raised by her mother and stepfather in Tokyo, Japan, by her mother and stepfather from the age of two when he was stationed in the Far East country by the United States Air Force.
The ‘Mortdecai’ star is very proud to be bilingual but admits she doesn’t get a chance to use her language skills very often.
When asked if gets to speak Japanese much, she said: ”No, not really. But I was lucky on (TV series) ‘The Newsroom’, because (Aaron) Sorkin wrote an amazing episode where I could. He asked me if he could put a few Japanese words in, and I said sure. Then he said, ‘Do you mind if it’s a sentence or two?’ And of course that was fine. And then I get the script and its full-on massive dialogue. Sorkin dialogue is hard enough to do in English – imagine doing it in Japanese … But I was very happy to use it. Even though I’m half Asian, most people didn’t know that I could speak a second language.”
