by Amanda Webster
One of this year’s CGA Rising Stars talks about her craft and women having their moment.
If you’re afraid to be faced with your own lack of achievement, don’t compare resumes with Grace Chow. Chow is an actor, award-winning playwright, theatremaker, and artist who graduated as dux from the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts [WAAPA] in writing, performance, and final works. Also, a recipient of the National Studio Residency offered by the Australian Theatre for Young People, Grace Chow is a creative force.
One of this year’s Casting Guild of Australia’s Rising Stars, an honour that recognises those on ‘the cusp of greatness,’ Grace tells us that she is “humbled and grateful for this opportunity and to be recognised in this way.” What’s more, she is “very excited for the opportunities ahead. It definitely feels like a wealth of opportunities are exploding for me right now in a way that wasn’t before.”
She is best known for her on-screen performances as Constable Cindy Chung in Mystery Road: Origins and Wendy Hang in the drama series The Twelve. Offscreen, her stage performances are abundant and diverse, appearing in productions at The Black Swan Theatre Company, Barking Gecko Theatre, and the Perth Festival, to name a few.
Chow is not afraid to try new things, playing hippie Beth in David Milroy’s musical Panawathi Girl and making her Opera debut in 2022 as lead Nell in Our Little Inventor. She has a particular affinity for quirky characters such as “Fan Wang, a futuristic nuclear saleswoman in OIL. It was a 3-hour show that demanded a Cornish accent, a British accent and some tight text in the Mandarin language as well. I remember an excellent couture neoprene suit and the world’s largest puffer – I ended up wearing it to a Spielberg red carpet; I loved it so much.
“I also loved Princess Fantastic in The Great Unwondering of Wilbur Whittaker – a 4000-year-old intergalactic space princess with karate moves to match. That show was magic. Physically demanding. It’s full of stage tricks and the best cast. Characters where I get to engage with an acting challenge – who are nothing like me, I enjoy them most. I want to chase the transformation in acting.”
You would think anyone with this many talents would come from a family of creatives, but Grace tells us that this is not the case. She comes from a long line of doctors, “and they really wanted me to be a doctor,” she tells us. “My dad’s a doctor, and his dad’s a doctor, and my sister’s a doctor. They really value the sciences.
“I remember my dad sneaking into my room in high school, begging me, basically trying to convince me to quit.”
Taiwanese/Singaporean, Chow’s parents immigrated to Australia, settling in a small country town, “I think population 2000,” she says. “I had five other people my age, and there was a lot of time to do nothing because the town was so small there was nothing in it, so to just fill time, we did a lot of creative things like, we baked, and we would write stories or we would paint. My creative hobbies have always been a part of my life and that kind of just graduated to a more serious interest when I hit high school.”
Although her first love was acting, “that was my way in,” she says, “then I realised I had things to say.” Chow is an acclaimed playwright, winning the nationally renowned Griffin Award for her play The Promise Land in 2022.
She speaks with passion and energy about her practice and how she likes to “grapple with a question” in her writing. “I have an affinity for social issues. I tend to try and address those questions in my work, community issues. For a long time, I wrote narrative-based works, and then I moved towards the experimental space… as I just found that a lot of the experimental stuff meant that you could push and challenge people more and a lot of my work tends to have a lot of gut and a lot of heart. It tends to have an element of magic realism, often gore.”
Grace’s first US comedy series, Good Cop, Bad Cop, is due for release in 2025. She co-stars alongside childhood heroes Leighton Meester and Clancy Brown. She describes her character Lindy Lim as “without a doubt my favourite on-screen character so far. She’s dark and twisted and cute — and says some pretty unpredictable things.”
Other recent work includes a commission by the WA Youth Theatre Company to write a work about missing persons called A Comprehensive A to Z of Missing Persons Australia. Coming out next month, “it’s a staging of all eight hundred cases in the Australia Federal Police Missing Persons Registry.” It’s something she’s keen to bring into the public consciousness, mentioning what’s “really under-discussed is that over fifty per cent of the people that go missing in Australia are actually youth. And at least eighty per cent of the cases are preventable.”
An advocate for inclusion, accessibility, and diversity, Grace is currently inspired by “a lot of leading Asian-Australian, Asian-American actresses that are having their moment on the international stage. We have an Asian-Australian [Yerin Ha] that’s going to lead Bridgerton next season. We have an Asian-American, Anna Sawai, she just won the Emmy for Shogun. It feels like there’s a real openness to Asian females leading series, that wasn’t celebrated before in the way that it’s being celebrated now. And that’s been really inspiring to me, seeing these women rise and being able to see that as potentially a pathway for myself.”
It’s no accident Grace Chow’s star is rising. She is driven, talented, and dedicated to her craft. She is presently immersed in writing her first feature, which she says she’s not ready to talk about just yet but “is coming out soon, so stay tuned!”
