We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jennifer Hsu a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jennifer thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I’ve never taken a risk I regretted, but I’ve regretted a lot of risks I’ve never taken.

Before an acting career, I was a computer science major in college trying to figure out what I wanted to do for a living. While I enjoyed math and technology, I realized I couldn’t do it everyday and be happy. A week before the application deadline, I decided to take a risk and apply for a masters degree in quantitative finance.
During graduate school, I was exposed to several tracks in a financial career and desired to take a shot at the hardest: becoming an investment banker on Wall Street. I poured all my energy towards getting into Goldman Sachs, a top tier firm that I had extremely low chances at coming from a non-Ivy League university. Professors encouraged me to apply to local firms or second tier banks as backups, but I had my heart set on Goldman…8 months later I was on a flight to New York for the first week of job training.
When I met a cute boy on Hinge in 2020, I invited him on a long roadtrip to the opposite side of the country a month after our first date. 4 years later, he is still my partner, my best friend, and the most patient audition partner an actor could ask for. My family and friends might think I’m a little bit reckless, but every risk has lead to new experiences and opportunities I might’ve never gotten otherwise.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m Jenn, with 2 Ns, and I’m an East Asian actor from a tiny northern New Mexican town called Taos. I’d like to think of myself mainly as an actor, but really I’m a jack-of-all-trades (and hopefully master of a few). I have a hard time sticking to one thing, but that’s what makes my life worth living. I grew up with a passion for performing arts, but had parents who pushed me to try as many things as possible.

In a 7,000 person town, that meant piano lessons at the local church, trying every sport possible at school, doing community theater, taking all AP classes and self-studying a few, hiking and snowboarding with my friends on the weekends, and working at my family’s restaurant at night. I live in the melting pot of LA now, but Taos was 56% Latino, 36% White, and only 1% Asian. It was a complicated intersectional upbringing, where I was constantly asked if my family ate cats, why my eyes looked like that, and if I was born in the US. I felt like an outsider all the time while also partaking in traditions like celebrating San Geronimo Day at the Taos Pueblo and watching the Fiestas de Taos at the downtown plaza. Our school didn’t have an orchestra, but we did have an absolutely outstanding Mariachi.

I used to resent living in a small town with less opportunities and being the only Chinese kid at school, but I’ve come to appreciate what it taught me. I developed firsthand perspectives on the important of resources and education, racism, socioeconomic struggles, and having a diverse community. As an actor, it’s made me passionate about representation in entertainment – I dream of one day playing the characters on screen that my younger self desperately needed.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I’ve always seen the world through pictures. When I think about creative projects, I instantly visualize shot lists in my head, transitioning from frame to frame. My favorite part of being a creative is being able to bring that to life and share it with others.

For several years now, I’ve been a portrait and landscape photographer/videographer on the side and found it to be the ultimate form of sharing my imagination. While I love acting and being in front of the camera, I have full control over my creative vision behind the camera and can actualize an emotional state from my mind into visuals.

For landscapes, I aim to bring viewers straight into the destination – eliciting a sense of the environment in audiences. For portraits, I see models as creatures of art – each curve and line an intimate piece of what it means to be human. The most rewarding experience in the world is when my subjects see their photos and say, “I didn’t know I could look like that” or “this makes me proud of my body and the different parts of me in a way that I never expected”. There is no greater joy for me than seeing so much potential in a place, moment, or person, and being able to experience that together.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

When I was completing my undergraduate degree, I was working as a Resident Assistant in the dorms. Upon my graduation, I was gifted a memoir book from our lead Graduate Assistants titled The Last Lecture. In it, a professor at Carnegie Mellon named Randy Pausch finds out he has pancreatic cancer and details the experience of putting together his last lecture. It starts as a book about knowing his end, but grows into the story of a man who fearlessly leaped into the unknown.

Pausch chronicles his life, writing about his many pursuits from courting his wife to working as a Walt Disney Imagineer to finding a loophole that would allow him to experience zero gravity. He was the world’s biggest risk taker and was truly unafraid to fail and try time and time again. As I’ve tried to follow in his footsteps and take on several challenging industries, this quote always returns to me:

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Instagram.com/Jenn.Hsu
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/jhsu320
• Other: [email protected]