Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
I always wonder how aware the people who make film and TV are of the ways in which we talk about it. Some of it must be unavoidable. How often must Kit Harrington get “You know nothing, Jon Snow” repeated back to him? But is Viola Davis aware of the sheer volume of Annalise Keating eye-roll gifs out there? Could she ever truly appreciate what a gift to social media she’s become? Even more fascinating are the subjects of cult adoration. Clearly, Cher has no idea how much I talk about Mermaids in a given week, but it’s out there in the universe, and anyone who follows me on social media is privy to it.
So when I sat down to interview Sandra Oh — along with the phenomenal Anne Heche — after seeing their upcoming movie Catfight at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this fall, I couldn’t help myself, and I asked her about The Princess Diaries. The 2001 film, directed by the late Garry Marshall and starring Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews, follows an ordinary American high-school girl who discovers she is the heir to the throne of a fictional European kingdom. Oh, years before she would break through with the premiere of Grey’s Anatomy, played the principal of Hathaway’s school. Perhaps you’ve seen the clip circulated around Twitter or Facebook, most likely by a Millennial for whom The Princess Diaries was A Thing when they were growing up. In the clip, an incredibly tense and terse Principal Gupta receives a phone call about the queen’s impending arrival.
That it’s Oh’s precision deliver that makes that line work so well is even better, because that makes this one a meme that recognizes talent rather than, say, accident (think of poor Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child falling down on 106 and Park).
So at the tail end of my Catfight interview, I asked Oh whether she knows her Princess Diaries scene went viral. And after explaining to Anne Heche what The Princess Diaries is and why she should watch it with her kid, Oh reflected on it.
Decider: I’ve just got time for one more question, if you’ll indulge me some off-topic-ness. I wanted to say, [Sandra], your performance in The Princess Diaries is something that I see younger people talk about all the time. That scene where she’s on the phone? And she’s like ‘Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh?’ I see it on Twitter all the time. It’s all these younger twentysomethings that are super into it. Do people ever talk to you about that?
Sandra Oh: You know, I will say, I have a good story about that. I was doing a play in Chicago last year and was just walking down the street, and there was a young man. I would say he’s somewhere in his early ’20s or whatever, and he walks by and then he comes back to me again and he stops me and he goes, “You’re Principal Gupta!” And then he does the frickin’ scene for me. On the phone, he goes, ‘Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, the queen is coming.’ And here’s this young man who’s probably in university there who stops me on the street in Chicago, and I was just like, ‘That’s a great moment.’ This young man watched it with his sister — he goes, ‘I gotta text my sister!’ It’s fantastic.
