A Conversation With Jason Lee of Amazon Prime Series 'Eighty 12'
Thomas Burns Scully
With the cry going up at the moment to support diverse works coming from independent creators, it can seem overwhelming to work out where to go to get your entertainment fix. Streaming services have been promoting their more prominent works featuring heterogeneous performers, writers, and directors, but where do you go if you want to seek out new voices coming up through the ranks?
If you haven’t already, now might be the time to give a look to Eighty 12, a new indie anthology series streaming on Amazon Prime created by Louis Rocky Baciagalupo. We spoke to series regular Jason Lee to tell us all about it
“It’s a coming of age story... an ‘astrological drama’,” explains Lee, “It follows twelve characters, each based on one of the Zodiac signs, and, over the course of seven episodes, we watch their stories interweave, both harmoniously and not.” Lee plays Libran, a character based off the star-sign Libra. “He’s a foreign exchange student living overseas for the first time,” the actor enthuses, “he’s struggling to adapt to his new life and to fit into ‘the circle’. He’s simultaneously wrangling the guilt of leaving his family behind, whilst also realizing that they want him to follow his dreams. In the midst of all this, he falls in love. So his heart is just being pulled in every possible direction.”
His portrayal of the conflicted Libran is informed by his own life story. Jason is Taiwanese, and got his start in acting there. His East Asian career has included such highlights as the Taipei Fringe Festival. “I starred in a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis,” Lee recounts, “When we were done we won the Fringe’s Excellence Award, and I took that as my signal to move to New York.” After moving to study at the famed Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, Lee tucked a number of Off-Broadway shows under his belt before joining the Eighty 12 team. He appeared in Richard III directed by Strasberg mentee James Jennings (founder and artistic director of the American Theatre of Actors), as well as Here to Recruit You a musical at the Fresh Fruit Festival about the life of Harvey Milk.
Eighty 12 is not the first piece he has been involved in that touts diversity. He was a key player in the experimental show Yell-Low directed by Taiwanese multi-disciplinary artist Jiang Feng. “That was such a defining experience for me. The show was this provocative manifesto about the low visibility and sociopolitical living state of Asians and Asian-Americans in the West,” he explains, “As a more recent arrival in this country I felt so heard and seen as part of a wider movement. So often the Asian community is unable to tell their own story, and that plays havoc with our sense of identity. This felt like a reclamation of the narrative.”
The Amazon Prime series, a chaotic, aggressively ‘other’ work by relatively nascent creator Louis Rocky Baciagalupo, pulls few punches with its portrayal of seventeen-year old emotional explosivity. “We all felt so vulnerable, so comfortable. These people felt like us, and we were almost just doing it for ourselves. It was so underground, and cool... then we got attention from big players like Amazon. It’s unbelievable, but here we are,” says an excited Lee, “I’m so proud of everyone involved. It’s a terrific and diverse cast and crew. All these viewpoints, backgrounds, and sexualities… I’d love to tell more stories with these people.
With COVID-19 effectively shutting down all film and TV production, even on independent fare like Eighty 12, the next steps for the creative team is uncertain. In the meantime, Lee is lining up as-yet-unannounced work with other directors, and enjoying the positive reception that the show has been getting. “People have been saying such nice things,” he reveals humbly, “It’s humbling to hear. I love how it feels like we’re reaching people. I feel like we made something special.”
Eighty 12 is free to stream with an Amazon Prime subscription.