It was the day of her audition for Emily in Paris, and Ashley Park was on the subway in New York. Sporting a bright yellow corduroy jacket and a pale pink fedora hat, she sat with her legs crossed, hunched over as she ran through her lines. Then she felt a tap on her shoulder. She looked up and saw a young woman with her hands full of Dr. Martens bags. She thought to herself, “You know what, I’m just going to connect with this person and talk with her.” 

The stranger on the subway turned out to be Erica, Emily in Paris’ costume assistant. 

“You know, as an actor, I always tend to think, ‘Oh, everything has to be perfect, or else I won’t get the part’”, Ashley shares. But some things are meant to be imperfect. Ashley soon wore her pink fedora again, but in Paris, as Mindy Chen, the BFF of protagonist Emily Cooper (Lily Collins), sitting on the film set of Netflix’s most-watched series. “After I got the part, Erica told Lily that we met because she was taking a photo of me to send to Patricia Field [Emily in Paris’ costume consultant] as fashion inspiration for my character,” she reveals. (It was definitely the hat!) “So if I hadn’t been running late and on that train, it wouldn’t have happened.”

It’s now 8:30 pm in New York. The actress hops on our Google Meets call from her room, rocking an oversized t-shirt and a Dior bucket hat. It looks like Parisian street style has rubbed off on her. Despite her red-eye flight the day before, there is barely a sign of fatigue on Ashley’s features. Instead, a bright smile adorns her face. “Aw, really? Thank you so much,” she beams as I compliment her outfit. A certain warmth emanates from the actress through the computer screen – sunny, charming, genuine – the same kind that radiates off Mindy. It’s barely ten minutes into the call, and I feel like I’m talking to a friend. It’s easy to see why Ashley and Mindy were meant to be. 

“I think something Mindy and I share is that we love connecting with people,” smiles Ashley. “When people think about fame, they think of it in context to themselves, like, ‘I’m famous, so a lot of people know me.’ But for me, what’s important is the other side of it: I’m able to reach and connect with more people around the world. I’ve had people come up to me in different countries who have never met an Asian person, you know, or have never really been friends with one.”

Connecting with an audience comes naturally to Ashley, and was something she began doing even before she could communicate her emotions with words. “I think my first ‘aha!’ moment, in terms of realising I loved performing, happened when I was two or three years old,” she recalls. “I love my halmeoni [grandmother in Korean], and whenever she would leave, I would put on this show and cry and cry and cry. After she left, I would stop the waterworks.” She chuckles, “I felt sad because I didn’t want her to leave, so I put on this show for her to feel it too. But I also realised I could snap out of it. I knew what that was.”

Ashley feels deeply and acts with intention. “That’s what I thought performing was,” she explains, “connecting to my audience, knowing what I want them to feel and doing whatever feels the most honest to me to make them feel that way.” On the battlefield that is the entertainment industry, her ability to interpret her characters with emotional nuance is her greatest weapon. While Mindy’s bubbly personality makes her likeable, it is the character’s struggle to reconcile her past with her present – finding love while healing from a broken relationship with her family and pursuing her musical dreams after being publicly humiliated for failing in a national singing competition – that makes her real.

“For me, it’s not interesting to play a character who is just crying. What’s interesting to me is a character who struggles not to cry, who tries to hide their sadness. That’s more interesting, finding the layers of it.” And Ashley digs deep to explore Mindy’s layers. “We all have things in our past that we ran away from. Things we didn’t want as part of our rhetoric,” she muses. “Something I have felt in my own life, is that as you grow, you realise these things make you who you are.”

Her journey in becoming Mindy was certainly a whirlwind of a story, or as any Gen-Z would say, a ‘main character moment’. But the actress “never saw [herself] as the protagonist in [her] own life.” She reveals, “As an Asian in America, I always felt like my value came from being the best supporting character in everyone else’s life. Throughout the last couple of years as I’ve played this role, I finally understand what it means to be the protagonist in my own life.”