Stephanie Hsu knows it sounds crazy, but when she first got the pitch for her dual role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, “it really made a lot of sense” to her. As the 32-year-old actor says now, “I really could see the thread of it and really understood the philosophical concept of it.”

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Hsu already knew the writing-directing duo The Daniels—Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—from a 2019 episode of Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens, so she had a firm grasp on their affinity for unusual storytelling. Therefore, a story in which she’d play both Joy, the frustrated daughter of Michelle Yeoh’s character, and Jobu Tupaki, a couture-wearing and all-powerful villain determined on imploding the world with an everything bagel, didn’t phase her much. 

Hsu, a Broadway actress most recently seen onscreen in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, has always gravitated to these sort of slice-of-life stories that “get exploded,” as she describes it—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of her favorite films. She dove right in to the process of figuring out how she’d play this pair of very different characters by focusing on what united them.

“We always say that Joy and Jobu are actually two very different expressions of the same philosophy,” Hsu says. “To me, they share the same exact heartbeat, they just respond to it very differently.”

We meet Hsu’s Joy Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once early on, when she goes to talk to her mother Evelyn (Yeoh) at the laundromat run by her parents. She’s dressed down in a flannel shirt, her long hair in a simple mid-part, and she’s begging for her mother to acknowledge her relationship with her girlfriend. But Evelyn isn’t hearing her, making Joy feel invisible. 

“Because I knew how crazy Jobu was going to be, I knew I wanted to take Joy all the way in the other direction—subtle and unassuming—so that the surprise of Jobu could be really satisfying,” Hsu says.

We don’t meet Jobu until after Evelyn has been introduced to the multiverse and told that there’s an evil force out there bent on annihilation. Soon, we learn that Jobu—an alternative universe version of Joy—became all-powerful because she was pushed by her own mother to verse-jump so many times that she fractured and now experiences everything, everywhere, at the same exact time.

Because of Jobu’s belief that nothing matters, Hsu and the Daniels spent a lot of time talking about nihilism. “We wanted to make sure that we created a villain that wasn’t just scary or weird for no reason, but that they had a very core philosophy,” says Hsu, who also dug deep into the experience of hyper-empathy as part of her research. “In a world where we’re saturated by news, and noise, and media, that can pull someone into the deep end of being so overwhelmed by the chaos that they can’t even find a way out. And then there’s another person who might be so over sensitized to all that chaos that they just create more.”

Jobu creates more chaos as she searches through the multiverse for Evelyn. And Jobu knows how to make an entrance: In one scene, she’s sporting pink hair, dressed in an Elvis-inspired ensemble, and has a pig on a leash; in another, she dons a preppy pink polo with a pleated skirt, toting a gold club. For her visit to the Bagel—an all-consuming and bagel-shaped black hole that Jobu created by filling it with everything in the universe—with Evelyn, she’s in a show-stopping all-white gown with an Elizabethan ruff and a braided hairstyle topped with a bagel-shaped bun.

But no matter the scene-stealing costume or extravagant makeup, Hsu says she was careful to never lean too far into the costumes: “Because she’s so all-powerful, it doesn’t even phase her that one moment she’s Elvis and another she’s in some neon green spike protein costume.”

One of her favorite costumes was what she calls Jumble Jobu, when her character wears a jumpsuit that’s wrapped in various materials towards the end of the film, as she’s nearing the peak of her destruction. “I love that costume because, conceptually, we knew that that was that third act moment when Jobu and Joy are really becoming one and the same, and you're starting to see this villain crack at the seams.” Costume designer Shirley Kurata pulled items from many of Jobu’s other costumes to weave into this look. “As an audience member, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s just a crazy assortment of clothes.’ But actually, I’m wearing Joy’s sneakers, I’m wearing the golf girl socks. As a performer, and as a sort of dramaturgical nerd, that is so satisfying when you’re creating texture that makes sense and that the chaos is not just for chaos’ sake—it’s that we’re actually trying to tell something about the story.”

Hsu brought a dash of extra chaos to a scene in which Evelyn throws a Chinese New Year celebration at the laundromat, with Jobu hiding in disguise as Joy. Hsu pitched the Daniels that Jobu should be in the background of every shot, as a way to emphasize that she’s become omnipresent. “It is one of my favorite parts because, for the film fanatics, they can feel that someone is watching her,” she says. “I love the Daniels much because they’re true collaborators. We just had so much fun really building this thing together in a way that I feel like not all directors give their actors a chance to do.”

Hsu studied other eccentric villain performances —including Jim Carrey as the Riddler and Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker—but notes that there was something unique about playing a female villain. “All these men have played these really wild, grotesque, kind of unlikable, but therefore likable characters,” she says. “And it felt different—vulnerable in a different way—to be a woman allowing herself to kind of spill out in that way and be kind of unlikable, both as Joy and Jobu.”

The experience has stuck with Hsu, who now finds herself in the supporting actress Oscar conversation (she just landed an Indie Spirit Awards best breakthrough performance nomination). As for her career moving forward, she’s reuniting with Yeoh for the ABC series American Born Chinese, and she just hopes she won’t have to jump into multiverse to find another role like Joy/Jobu. “Now, I think I’m really hungry for something that’s deeply challenging and as complex as this movie,” she says. “I know that they’re few and far between—so it’s part hunting and part growing it yourself.”