Loving, Caring, Cautious, Fearful: BD Wong Analyzes His Character’s Parenting Trap in AWKWAFINA IS NORA FROM QUEENS

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede What does a parent do with a kid like Nora? The Nora character in AWKWAFINA IS NORA FROM QUEENS – which airs its Season 2 finale, Wednesday, Oct. 13 at 10 p.m. ET on Much – isn’t even really a kid any more. Played by award-winning actress and rapper Awkwafina (real name Nora Lum), with the story loosely based on her own upbringing, Nora is a young adult still locked in an adolescent lifestyle, living at home with her dad Wally, played by BD Wong, and her grandma, played by Lori Tan Chinn. “I know about this, I have experienced various different manifestations of this in my own life,” Wong said. “What you end up doing as a parent is straddling the line between wanting the best of everything for them, and not wanting to micromanage them. But you still wish you could just shake them and say, ‘you need to do this right now!’ ” Recalling his own childhood, Wong added, “When I grew up, my parents made me do things – the discipline was of a very intense variety in some ways. These days, there’s much more of a sense of letting kids find their own way, which I think is generally a good thing. But the side-effect is, you have to back off. So I think that’s what has happened with Wally and Nora. He wants to force her to do things, but he knows it’s not really going to work. So he’s stuck.” That’s where some fear comes into it for Wally, too – which can lead to humorous situations for viewers of AWKWAFINA IS NORA FROM QUEENS, if not necessarily for Wally himself. “Nora is also kind of scary,” Wong agreed. “She has made things miserable for him in the past, and continues to do so. But he knows that growing up without a mom has been hard for her, and he doesn’t want to blame her. He has been cutting her slack her whole life because of that one terrible fact about her existence, which haunts him as well, you know? So he takes it.” Example: in an episode midway through Season 2 (available on CTV.ca, with Season 1 on Crave), Wally arranges a dinner in which Nora is meeting his girlfriend Brenda, played by Jennifer Esposito, for the first time. Wally is terrified of how Nora might act out, and she justifies his concern. At one point Nora says something so jarring, Wally responds with a particularly convincing spit-take. Even for an actor as experienced as Wong – a TONY® Award-winner whose on-screen resume includes everything from the Jurassic Park franchise, to LAW & ORDER: SVU, OZ, and MR. ROBOT – the situations his character faces in AWKWAFINA IS NORA FROM QUEENS must make this one of the weirdest roles of his career. “I never really thought of it as weird, actually, but I guess I see what you mean,” Wong said. “I always try to do things that are different from the things I’ve done before, and not re-walk the same territory. As you get older, that gets harder, because you’ve covered a lot of the bases. But this felt very natural to me, and continues to satisfy me in a really big way.” The natural feel definitely shines through for the audience, as it’s totally convincing and believable that Wally’s parenting would have produced Nora. “Well, it’s real life – this is the real relationship that actually exists, and the show is built around this germ of truth of a young woman growing up with her grandma and her dad in Queens, and all the things that entails,” Wong said. “So it feels organic, like nobody made it up. She has these issues, and he has these issues, and the ‘Point A to Point B’ of truth and fiction is really, really short. It’s really not that big a stretch.” bilharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv