Chris Pang breaks typecast with his best role yet in 'The Season'

By Randall Yip, Executive Editor

Poor and with little acting experience, Chris Pang came to Hong Kong on a dream in 2009 in search for his first on screen acting credit. 

Fast forward to 2025, he returns to Hong Kong to play the arrogant, abrasive socialite and party boy Andrew Fung in PCCW Media and SK Global’s new series, The Season on Hulu.

Pang first gained fame in 2018 as Colin Khoo, the best friend of Nick Young (Henry Golding) in Crazy Rich Asians. Andrew is  the kind of role Pang has long coveted

“I don’t know why, I get pulled in a lot to play these nice guy roles. You get like your best friend, and like, oh, I’m a supporting friend who’s really lovely and charming and nice, and all these light, warm characters, and I’m like, reading Andrew, and this guy is the complete opposite. He’s an absolute a*shole. He’s not a nice person at all. And he just speaks his mind, which is so refreshing,” Pang told AsAmNews

The Season puts together a predominantly Asian cast that also stars Jessie Mei Li as Cola, Justin Chien as David Ho, and Toby Stephens as Christopher Hext.  Although Hulu dropped all six episodes on June 23, it’s too early to know whether the series will get a second season. 

The show gets its name from the boating season, the time of year in Hong Kong when rich people take out their yachts and turn it into one big party. In The Season, characters do what they have to to climb the social ladder and as Pang puts it, “you have to be seen a certain way, and all that. Then as the series goes on, you start seeing the cracks in all these characters and you realize that everybody’s dealing with something and there’s a bunch of secrets”. 

The Season is one of the rare times Asian men are seen on the screen as confident sex symbols. The Asian Australian actor notes that American born Chinese and Australian born Chinese are both known by the same acronym, ABC. He says the similarities don’t end there.

“Having grown up in Australia, I never saw Asian faces on screen in English speaking projects… I didn’t see anyone that I wanted to emulate or be like except in Hong Kong cinema.

The biggest difference, I would say culturally, I think is that the Asian community in America has advanced further in their fight for rights and fight to establish an identity.  In that sense, I attribute that partly for having a role model to go off. You have the Black community, who’ve done a lot of work fighting for rights, and you have a model and these leaders to sort of model your trajectory after, and we didn’t have that in Australia.”

Andrew’s love interest in The Season is Madeline Huang as played by Yvonne Chapman. It’s in this relationship that you see Andrew’s softer side. The brash character turns into a puppy dog when he’s around Madeline in what Pang considers “the most beautiful moments in the series” Once the audience “peels back the layers you realize he’s quite a softy” who just wants to be loved, he says.  

On the other side of the spectrum is his macho relationship with his best friend David Ho (Justin Chien). The two are polar opposites with Andrew the cocky one. David is prim and proper and the son of a high powered attorney for the richest couple in Hong Kong. David takes over the account from his father. Andrew openly promotes David, a recent divorcee, as Hong Kong’s most eligible bachelor. 

“I think Andrew sort of is abrasive from the beginning and gets more and more likable. David is the opposite. Right? He comes in and he’s like this perfect knight in shining armor. He’s on paper that, you know, ticks all the boxes and then as he unravels, you realize, oh, no, this guy’s, this is definitely not who you think he is. And so it’s almost like a transverse trajectory, which is really lovely..”

Intertwined in all this is Cola (Jessie Mei Lei). She wants something and is concocting quite a plot to make it happen. Each chapter unravels a new plot point, revealing exactly what she is after. How Andrew, David and Madeline fit into all this makes for quite an interesting series. 

Celina Jade plays Carrie Shen and Cola’s boss. This is more than a boss-worker relationship. While Carrie thinks she’s Cola’s mentor, Cola sees Carrie in a much different light. What motivates Cola is the main focus of The Season.

The Season is another step up for Asian masculinity as portrayed in Hollywood. It’s executive produced and written by Yalen Tu and directed by Marialy Rivas. 

Fung’s next big project is a biopic on Sessue Hayakawa, one of Hollywood’s first leading men in the silent film era.

“And he was Asian, and no one really knows his story. It’s kind of been buried in history and so we are going to tell that story. I think it’s so important, and it’s crazy to think that everything that I’m fighting for, he already achieved a 100 years ago. Amazing.”

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