Sandra Oh on anger, friendship and finding power in midlife

Sandra Oh arrives at the National Theatre in London with surplus post-rehearsal energy, shedding sunglasses before collapsing into a chair and groaning about “the fucking process of it.” She had just finished the first stagger-through, noting how the Lyttelton lets you hear verse differently — it’s not only about volume or speed but about learning from the space.

“I’m just marching on,” she adds, then bellows with laughter. Oh has been in London rehearsing Alice, a gender-flipped novelist in a modern reimagining of Molière’s Le Misanthrope adapted by Martin Crimp. It marks a deliberate pivot back to theatre after the phenomenon of Killing Eve, which made her Eve Polastri and changed her life as an actor; recent seasons have included Twelfth Night at the Delacorte and a debut at the Metropolitan Opera in La Fille du Régiment.

She values theatre’s collaborative nature — not least because, she says drily, no one does it for the money.

sandra oh, killing eve, national theatre, london, molière, le misanthrope, martin crimp, twelfth night, lyttelton, eve polastri