Hoa Xuande's Captain in The Sympathizer agrees with everyone at the table and tells only us the truth, in a dry, weary murmur that makes a double life sound like a minor inconvenience. It is one part, but a large one, and he carried it.
Fi1m perspective
The Captain pours the drinks. He listens to the General, laughs at Claude's jokes, embraces his blood brothers, and only in voiceover does he tell us what he actually thinks. Hoa Xuande plays all of this in The Sympathizer (2024) without a wink. The face does one job and the voice does another, and he never lets the two meet where anyone else can see. That is the whole trick of a spy, and it is a surprisingly rare thing for an actor to manage across a full series without once nudging the audience.
He came to it from a short CV. Small roles in Australian television after training at WAAPA, then Lin in the 2021 live-action Cowboy Bebop, his first substantial credit outside Australia. The Captain arrived after an eight-month audition process, and some observers wondered aloud whether a man with so little behind him could hold a production of that size. He has since played Professor Zei in the 2024 Avatar: The Last Airbender, a recurring part we have not reviewed and will not judge here.
What we can judge is the series, and he is the best thing in it. Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar's adaptation is stylish and often funny, and it also drifts through its middle episodes and tells the Robert Downey Jr. joke too many times. Whenever the thread is lost, it is Xuande who finds it. He holds the tone together when the series around him cannot decide whether it is a farce or a tragedy, and he does it mostly by keeping still. When the Captain is at last allowed to feel something, in the Los Angeles scenes with Sandra Oh's Sofia Mori, the effect knocked us back further than we expected, because he had spent so many hours keeping the man's face composed that a crack in it counted for a great deal.
The question is what he does with that. Xuande has said he wanted to "investigate the emotional life of not knowing where you belong", and he plainly did. The risk is that the industry, having noticed, keeps offering him the same man in different clothes: the outsider, the go-between, the one with two faces. He is good at it. He may be good at other things too, and nobody has yet asked. The next part worth watching for is the one where he is not required to agree with anyone.
Biography
Hoa Xuande is an Australian actor of Vietnamese descent. Born Hoa Xuan Nguyen in Sydney, he was raised in Melbourne, where he attended Trinity Grammar School. He trained as an actor at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
Xuande began his career in Australian productions. He appeared as Elvin in the comedy series Ronny Chieng: International Student (2016–2017) and as Khoa in the SBS series Hungry Ghosts (2020). He gained wider recognition for his role as Lin in the 2021 Netflix series Cowboy Bebop. In 2024, he played the lead role of the Captain in the HBO series The Sympathizer, an adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel. For this performance, he received nominations for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Breakthrough Performance in a New Scripted Series, the Gotham Award for Outstanding Performance in a Limited Series and the Satellite Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film.
Other credits include roles in Last King of the Cross (2023) and Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) as Professor Zei.
