Death and Other Details is the latest murder mystery series to hit the small screen. The show began filming in 2021 and premiered on Hulu on January 16th this year. Taking inspiration from famed detective novel author Agatha Christie, the story follows the “World’s Greatest Detective,” Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin) and Imogene Scott (Sophia Reid-Gantzert) as they investigate a closed-door murder that occurred on a cruise ship. As secrets are revealed and identities are found, the sleuthing duo soon discover that there’s more to the crime than meets the eye.
The show begins with a young child, Imogene Scott, who meets Rufus Cotesworth as he begins to investigate her mother’s murder. Imogene is raised by her mother’s bosses, the Collier family, a wealthy family who owns and operates the Collier Mills company. Fast forward nearly 20 years, and Scott is invited by her adoptive family to board a luxury cruise liner, which they’ve rented out for their closest friends, peers, and the even wealthier Chun family in hopes of striking a deal that will save them from financial ruin. Unfortunately, things take a turn for the worse when one passenger, Keith Trubitsky (Michael Gladis), is murdered in his suite.
This prompts the reunion between Scott and Cotesworth, who work together to solve the murder and possibly find the culprit responsible for the murder of Scott’s mother along the way. As they continue their investigation, the duo gains both allies and enemies among the passengers and crew and are reminded that they must remember the past in order to move forward. After the premiere of the first two episodes, Asia Blooming spoke with Angela Zhou, a staff writer on the show and the actress who plays the maître d’hôtel, Teddy Goh, about the series, her acting career, diverse Asian representation in media, and more.
When thinking back on how she first joined the project, Angela became pensive. “At first, it was really [because of] how fun and twisty it was – the writing was amazing, and it just seemed like it would be a blast to do the show.” After taking a pause, she continued on to credit the amount of representation she saw.: ”I thought it was incredibly surprising that it was the only project I’ve ever read, where I wasn’t the only Asian character or I wasn’t in a fully Asian cast. I actually went back to the title page after I read it like, is one of the writers Asian? I couldn’t believe that there were so many Asian female characters! I thought it was going to be such a relief not to have the weight of representing an entire community of like a billion people on my character’s shoulders. Also, I had not seen any non-Asian specific shows tackle the difference between the Cantonese speaking characters and Mandarin speaking characters before either!”
Sharing the story of how her role as a cast member morphed into being a staff writer as well, Angela thought back to the beginning of filming. “During COVID, I actually finished this project I had been trying to write for a very long time about China’s first and only female emperor, Empress Wu Zetian. When I finished, I submitted it to the Academy Nicholl Screenwriting Competition, and when we were on set shooting the pilot in September 2021, the competition announced their finalists. I was named as a semi-finalist, which is like the top 1% of competitors chosen in a blind judging process. But, I didn’t want people to think I was distracted from what I was doing on set though, so I actually didn’t tell anyone and just posted about it on my Instagram and included the logline on Instagram. It turns out, [creators] Mike [Weiss] and Heidi [Cole McAdams] were following me on Instagram, and they read it. They love historical dramas and they were super intrigued, but they were so sneaky. In true detective fashion, they asked the assistants on set to get the pilot from me and not tell me they were going to read it in case they hated it. Then, months later in January 2022, I got a call from Mike and Heidi. They said, ‘Good news, Death and Other Details was picked up to be a series! Also, we did something cheeky and we read Empress. We don’t know what you want to do with your career, but if you want to write, we would love to have you in the writer’s room as a staff writer.’”
From there, Angela had a steep learning curve ahead of her. “I didn’t realize how television writing works. And, I’ve never written as part of a big team of 10 writers before, either. I have heard the slight differences of how show runners like to do it, and how streaming versus broadcast television can be different, too,” she said. “But, in our case, Mike and Heidi split up the episodes themselves. Basically, in our first couple of weeks, they told us when we signed on who the killer was, and all the big twists and turns, so we had the big strokes, and we just needed to come up with the little twists and turns on how we would get there. And after we all had a good idea of pitching the ideas for what would happen in the 10 episodes, Mike and Heidi just chose who they put on which episode. But, we also did this thing called group writing, so really, even though your name is on one episode, sometimes you still end up writing just as many scenes as you did in another episode.”
Splitting her time between being on-camera and off, Zhou expressed how fortunate she felt to be able to have this type of balance in her role: “I felt like it was Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for me. If I only wrote the entire year, maybe I would feel too lonely. And, if I only acted for the entire year, maybe I would feel burnt out on too much socialization.” Getting her start in theater, Zhou studied at the Young Shakespeare Company, and even performed at London’s Globe Theatre in her youth. This contributed to her love of being involved in productions both on-stage and off, which then translated into her love for acting and writing. “I went to a high school that forced you to take a performing arts class, and I actually picked dance at first because I had watched Honey, and I wanted to be Jessica Alba. But, it clashed [with my schedule], so they put me in drama instead. But, the great thing about studying drama and theater in high school is that there were so many opportunities to practice. They split our grades as 50% criticism, and 50% self devised drama. For criticism, we were analyzing Shakespeare and other productions, and for the other half, we had to write an act and direct our own pieces. So, if it wasn’t for theater, I don’t think I would have so naturally been drawn to both the acting and the writing.”
When it came time to switch gears and portray her on-screen character, Angela transformed into Teddy Goh, the maître d’hôtel tasked with protecting the ship’s staff and speaking with any and every guest on the ship to cater to their needs. While doing her job, Teddy often switched between Cantonese, English, and Mandarin, depending on who she was speaking with. Crew members who were her relatives spoke Cantonese, the Chun family spoke Mandarin, and everyone else aboard spoke English. For Angela, this came naturally to her as well: “I’ve actually spoken Mandarin and Cantonese on different shows before, so I’ve had a decent amount of experience doing it. Plus, Mandarin and Cantonese were my first languages – I learned Cantonese from my father’s side of the family and Mandarin from my mother’s side.”
Tuning in to the fine details of the show, the creators were incredibly open to suggestions and corrections to make the show as accurate to each culture as possible as well: “Mike and Heidi were so wonderful to collaborate with, because they made a show that said details matter. If you notice, my character’s name is Teddy Goh, but in some places, it’s written as Teddy Gao. But, that’s actually Mandarin, and not the Cantonese spelling, you know? So [after I landed the role], I brought up changing the last name to them because Teddy is Cantonese, and they said of course [and changed it right away].” Additionally, the show is filled with several Asian cast members, with both big and small roles. Yet, their roles are not defined strictly by their ethnicity; instead, actors such as Karoline, Annie Q. Riegel, Lisa Lu, Rahul Kohli, and Angela Zhou herself play regular characters that could have been anybody. “Us Asians in the West, there are so many of us like that! We’re born in the West, but we’re also Asian. Like Rahul [Kohli], for example, he looks South Asian, but he was born in the UK,” Zhou began. “There are also so many of us that immigrated here, like me. We’ve had enough of the talks and portrayals about being the constant immigrant and always the outsider, just because we look so different. [With Death and Other Details], I loved that I could put on a British accent instead of one of the ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ accents.”
Eager for the world to watch the final product as someone who took part in the production in more ways than one, Angela truly thinks the amount of thought put into the story is what makes this story unlike other murder mysteries: “One of the things that I felt very strongly about is that you need to play fair with the audience. You’re actually writing a story that the audience can piece together, while still allowing it to be surprising at the end so that it feels like you’re finally getting to scratch that itch,” shared Zhou. “It’s finding the balance of surprising but not so outlandish and illogical, and not so that nobody could have ever guessed right. I also don’t believe in writing stuff that you can just skip the entire in-between. I feel like, for it to make sense, you still need to catch all the details in the middle.”
Finishing off her thoughts, Angela hopes everyone can look forward to the full 10-episode series once it’s finished airing: “It’s one of the shows where you’ll want to go back to the very beginning and watch for the little details once you’re done. I can’t wait for people to see it happen, and I can’t wait to see the reaction at the very end. I’m just so excited!” Death and Other Details is streaming now on Hulu, with new episodes every Tuesday.
