Ashley Park is showing me a photo of the felt-animal bookmarks she made the evening after filming wrapped on season four of Emily in Paris. “Aren’t they just the cutest?” she says chirpily. “Everyone was like, what did you do on your last night in Paris? I was literally in my hotel room, making a whole box of these bookmarks.”
The actress is upbeat today, as warm and lively in person as her on-screen alter ego Mindy Chen, but there’s a serious point behind her light-hearted self-deprecation. If she chose to spend a rare evening off doing arts and crafts by herself, it’s because she desperately needed the break. Over Christmas, while on holiday in Thailand with her boyfriend, the Emily in Paris cast member Paul Forman (who plays her love interest, Nicolas de Leon, in the show’s third series), she contracted a case of tonsillitis that developed into critical septic shock. Her illness meant she returned to filming later than her castmates, but even then, she admits it was against her doctor’s advice, flying straight from hospital in Asia to Paris to begin filming. “I haven’t been home or seen my family, I’ve constantly been on someone else’s schedule, whether it be the doctors’, the ICU’s, filming…” No wonder she relished the chance for some alone time. “I liked the idea that there was a box of these bookmarks to make, and by the end of the evening I was going to have them finished,” she says. “I think I’m learning – I’ve had to learn – to be more forgiving with myself. To be proud of the small goals I accomplish, rather than feeling overwhelmed by everythingI have to catch up on.”
It’s a good sentiment, but Park is unlikely to have a quiet period any time soon. The former Broadway star is now in high demand as a film and television actress, having won viewers’ hearts as Mindy, given us a glimpse of her dark side in the critically acclaimed Netflix revenge drama Beef, appeared alongside Steve Martin and Selena Gomez in Only Murders in the Building and turned leading lady in the R-rated Asian comedy film Joy Ride. Even this shoot and interview have been a challenge to fit in around her tight production schedule: she has squeezed in a flying visit to London between finishing filming in France and heading to Italy for the next Emily in Paris production phase (the upcoming season is split into two halves, with the second following Emily and her entourage as they embark on a Roman holiday).
Fortunately, Park is happy to be here in London, where her British beau is based; we are meeting today in a café in Bermondsey, not far from his home, where she hopes to spend more time in the not-too-distant future. (She owns a house in Los Angeles, but reveals to me that she has recently sold her New York property, with a view to prioritising being in the UK with Forman.) On Bazaar’s shoot, she was a consummate professional, chatting easily with the team and posing with a relaxed, balletic grace that attests to her years of training as a dancer. “I haven’t been on a shoot for a while, and it was nice to feel my personal growth,” she tells me. “When I was first doing this stuff, I felt a bit of a fraud –like I had to punk everyone into thinking I belong – whereas now I feel what a privilege that I get to show myself as I am.”
Dress, Stella McCartney; earrings, Pandora Essence
It’s fair to say that we’re beginning to see a little more of Ashley Park in the characters she portrays – including in Mindy’s evolving fashion sense. Since its pilot episode, Emily in Paris has offered up a feast of fabulous looks, thanks in part to the influence of the Sex and the City costume-design supremo Patricia Field, who was a consultant for two seasons. From Emily’s bright-pink Kenzo coat in the first series – a much-needed hit of dopamine dressing that brought colour to our lockdown lives back in 2020 – to the fluorescent Mugler catsuit that Mindy wears for her debut jazz-club performance in the third, the aesthetic has frequently been one of ‘more is more’. Lately, however, Park says that her personal (somewhat less outré) taste in clothing has begun to shape Mindy’s. “I think our styles have converged as Mindy has become more of a woman,” she observes. “She’s owning her power a little better, rather than dressing for attention.” Meanwhile, Park – who is today channelling a preppy vibe in an embroidered cardigan and wide headband – has quietly embraced her style-icon status, sharing images of her glamorous red-carpet appearances on Instagram and even dipping a toe into fashion design through collaborations with Skechers and Rent the Runway. Given the choice, she favours an oversize blazer and “different layers you can mix and match” –preferences we can expect to see creeping into Mindy’s wardrobe in the episodes to come.
Park and Collins in ’Emily in Paris’
One thing that won’t have changed in the new series is the strength of the female friendship at the heart of the show. Park and Lily Collins are as close in the real world as their on-screen counterparts, having hit it off from the moment they met – or even, says Park, prior to then. “Lily doesn’t believe me when I tell her this, but a week before the email came in asking me to audition, I’d just started to follow her on Instagram,” she recalls. “I normally have a rule that I only follow people I know or have interacted with in some way, but Lily was one of the few I followed because I thought, I like this girl, I like her vibe – she seems really genuine and cool.” The feeling turned out to be mutual, and the pair were soon spending their off-screen time together, strolling through the Tuileries and going to macaron-making classes.
Four seasons in, Park says that each pushes the other to perform at their best and that the friendship has been crucial to helping her handle the ups and downs of the showbiz lifestyle. “It would just have been too much of a whirlwind to do on my own,” she says of Emily in Paris’ inaugural season, which was streamed by 58 million house-holds in 2020. “And it was my first big on-screen job, so it was amazing to have the guidance of an ‘older sister’ in an environment that became way more high-stakes than we’d anticipated.” The pair have seen each other through big life changes – “a lot of unexpected ones and a lot of
beautiful ones” – like Collins’ marriage to the film director Charlie McDowell and Park’s blossoming romance with Forman, as well as her recent unexpected illness, which made even turning up on set a challenge. “Filming was physically taxing in a way I hadn’t previously endured,” she acknowledges. “But I had to stop gaslighting myself and be like, I’m allowed to feel this way. I’ll do the best I can in these stilettos and this latex skirt, and I can be proud when I watch this season and know the amount of passion and hard work I put in just to be there.”
Dress, Chloé
The truth is that Park has always been a fighter. This is not the first time she has battled a serious health condition: as an adolescent, she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia and spent eight months in hospital. Determined that the experience would not define her, she pursued her passion for performing with gusto, making her professional-theatre debut after graduating from high school in 2009 and appearing on Broadway five years later. She worked her way up steadily from an ensemble role in Mamma Mia! to a Grammy Award-nominated vocal performance as the lead in 2016’s The King and I; then, as Gretchen Wieners in Tina Fey’s Mean Girls musical, she impressed critics with her knack for comic timing, combined with an understanding of the character’s innate vulnerability. “I think the best comedy and drama aren’t on two sides of the fence – they’re on exactly the same line,” she says. “I like stories that can make an audience’s heart break and, in the same moment, make them laugh like crazy.”
Jacket and shorts, Schiaparelli; wedges, Emilia Wickstead; jewellery, Pandora Essence
That can certainly be said of 2023’s Joy Ride, which saw Park take top billing for the first time on screen. Directed by Adele Lim, who brought together an entirely East and Southeast Asian cast and crew, the film co-opts tropes traditionally associated with male-dominated gross-out comedies (sex, drugs, graphic scenes featuring bodily functions) and places them in the context of a narrative that asks genuinely probing questions about cultural identity. Park, who grew up in Michigan and is of Korean descent, says that appearing in the film prompted her to reflect on her own roots in a way she had never done before. “I don’t think I’d ever ‘separated’ my Asian heritage as much as I did then,” she admits. “To be creatively led and surrounded by other leads who were all Asian was just the best experience.” She noticed herself no longer having to do what she euphemistically calls ‘navigating’. “That’s not to say people were difficult on other projects – it’s just that I’d been used to being the only Asian person on set and accommodating myself around that,” she continues. “Even growing up, it was always like, OK, what dimension of myself will make this group of people most comfortable? And so, I understand how hard I’ve worked to get to a point where people will see me as this or that kind of actress, rather than just ‘that Asian girl from Emily in Paris‘.”
Dress and ballet pumps, Miu Miu
As she continues to take greater control of her professional and personal identity, Park is learning to be more selective about the projects she works on. Sometimes it is a particular role that attracts her (“I think there are characters that find me, whose instincts I understand”); at all times, it has to be the right creative team – because, as she points out, “if I’m going to be in a building with the same set of people three times a week, they have to be awesome ones who get me excited”. Two industry veterans she especially admires are Tina Fey, who brought her on board for the Peacock (now Netflix) comedy series Girls5eva following their Mean Girls collaboration, and Laura Linney, who helped her make the transition from a theatre to a television actress when they appeared in the 2019 drama miniseries Tales of the City. At some point, Park would love to return to the stage (“I miss that live interaction with the audience – you never get the same alchemy of a show twice”), but for now, there is plenty of scope to develop her career on the screen. “I want opportunities to surprise myself and other people – to make them think, oh, I’d never have seen her as that,” she says, observing how much she relished playing against type in Beef, in which her character is far from likeable. Moving behind the camera isn’t yet on the agenda; for now, she says, “I’m quite happy being an actor who writers and directors love, because I think like them and see what they’re trying to do.” She enjoyed being a part of the forthcoming female-directed indie film A Tree Fell in the Woods (plot details for which are still under wraps) and hopes to take on roles that plumb her emotional depths even further.
Has she any other priorities for the year ahead? “Well… I’d love to film somewhere warm next,” she says with a grin. “Paris in the winter was not ideal!” Season five: Emily Down Under? In Ashley Park’s world, anything is possible.
Dress, Tove; shoes, Dear Frances; jewellery, Pandora Essence
‘Emily in Paris’ season four, Part 1 will be on Netflix from 15 August andPart 2 from 12 September.