Blazing trails in Hollywood

Many consider Reader’s Digest to be that small publication found on grandparents’ coffee tables, in bathroom storage baskets and doctors’ waiting rooms, and around grocery store checkout lines.

But the chunky magazine, roughly half the size of a traditional publication and now primarily digitally focused, gained a huge following by featuring inspiring and intriguing stories that mostly centered on families. One of those readers whose curiosity was roused was a young Michelle Krusiec.

“I used to read Reader’s Digest regularly,” Krusiec said. “I used to read all those little anecdotes that people would send in, and I just found those anecdotes, those little stories, to be really inspiring.”

The inspiration drawn from Reader’s Digest ultimately brought Krusiec ’95 to Blacksburg and served as the foundation for this Virginia Tech alumna’s undeniably successful career in Hollywood as a writer, actress, and director.

Many in the entertainment industry excel in one specific profession. Sandra Bullock, for example, is an accomplished actress, and Steven Spielberg an acclaimed director. Rarely, though, does one establish credentials in all three fields.

Yet Krusiec is putting together a rather notable resumé, which has, over time, allowed her to be selective with her projects.

“I’ve been acting for most of my career, and now that I’m directing, I look at what’s meaningful to me based on the project,” she said. “If acting gives me the most visibility to say what’s valuable in that project, I’ll do that. If it’s writing or directing, then I’ll switch to that, so it really depends on the project. I really love what I’m discovering with writing and directing in that I think it’s needed. We need more people behind the lens, too, so that more opportunities can be created.”

Krusiec was born in Taiwan and grew up in the Tidewater area of Virginia after her father’s career in the Navy brought the family there. One of the few Taiwanese American students at her schools and in her neighborhood, she said she used writing and performing as an outlet for expressing herself as a minority kid, usually using comedy to detail the internal conflicts of being Taiwanese at home and an American in public.

Two of her biggest breaks occurred after she enrolled at Virginia Tech and started pursuing a theatre arts degree in what is now the School of Performing Arts in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design. She met Oliver Stone, a distinguished film director, when he visited the campus, and he later cast her in “Nixon,” a film about the former president, with Anthony Hopkins as the lead.

Arguably more importantly, though, the faculty and staff at Virginia Tech encouraged Krusiec to tap into her creative side. Barbara Carlisle, a former department chair who passed away in 2007, especially emboldened Krusiec, and while at Virginia Tech, Krusiec created a show called “Made in Taiwan.” When she went to Hollywood after graduation, she impressed directors, producers, and especially other power players within Creative Artists Agency who tried to package “Made in Taiwan” as a television show.

“It was a huge break for me because I went to Los Angeles with a written piece of material that was reflective of my voice and gave me authorship,” Krusiec said. “Being in your 20s in Los Angeles and having a show like that gave me a real launch into the industry. I was able to get a talent contract from one of the studios. That show really opened a ton of doors for me, and I’m grateful that I was able to write that show while I was at Tech, because it became my calling card for the first 10 years of my career.”

Krusiec’s acting credential’s include roles in familiar films such as “Sweet Home Alabama,” “What Happens in Vegas,” “Far North,” “Saving Face,” and more recently, “A Million Miles Away.” She has been cast in three decades worth of television roles, too, such as “Hawaii Five-O” “NCIS,” and others.

She admits that her favorite role came recently in the 2020 Netflix limited series “Hollywood,” when she played Anna May Wong in a real-life piece about a woman known as the first Asian American movie star. Wong, who passed away from a heart attack in 1961, helped to humanize Chinese Americans during a period in which Chinese Americans had been viewed as foreign in American society.

“That was an amazing role that I was able to study, and it really inspired me to look at her life and think about the kind of work she did, which made me rethink Hollywood and some of the challenges that she was faced, which are the same challenges I was faced with,” Krusiec said. “Even though we are 100 years apart, things hadn’t changed, so it gave me a lot of insight as to how racism works, and how she approached her career and how I had been approaching my career. It made me think about the kinds of things that I could do now in this present day to try and make things better.”

Throughout her nearly 30-year career, Krusiec has been a passionate advocate of the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) movement, particularly within the entertainment industry. As she said, “If we don’t see ourselves reflected in the world, we tend to miss a piece of ourselves.” She’s been so vocal for so long that an April article headline by EnVi Media referred to her as the “godmother” of the AAPI movement.

That movement received a boost this past spring when the film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won seven Oscars at the 95th Academy Awards. The film featured an Asian director and a mostly Asian cast.

“That was a huge landmark win for us,” Krusiec said. “That hasn’t ever happened. I would say that’s progress. … There tends to be a cycle of having a person of color that kind of gets to be selected as the flavor of Hollywood. It kind of gets replaced by the next flavor of Hollywood, so people tend to question the lasting benefits of it, but I think it’s progress.

“I’m somebody who’s in midlife now. … I’m enjoying trying to see if I can create opportunities for others. That excites me. It’s also hard. It’s kind of like a challenge, and I’ve always been, for some reason, attracted to the tougher things in life. I think it’s because, with those big risks, you might get bigger pushes in life. We might find greater rewards and greater successes.”

Krusiec said her future consists of continued advocation, not just through her voice, but also through her work. She pursues roles that appeal to her, and her writing and directing often reflect her Asian heritage, allowing her to serve as a role model within the industry and for future generations of Asians interested in entertainment.

She does all this during challenging times in Hollywood these days – a recent Los Angeles Times story reported that film and television production was down 40 percent in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2022. Yet Krusiec finds herself weathering the storm well.

As an actress, she currently is working on a series called “Orphan” with Ellen Pompeo — of “Grey’s Anatomy” fame — and Mark Duplass. As a writer and director, she just toured her horror short film called “Nian” and is working on creating and developing another horror film.

“I’m grateful when I can act, and I’m given opportunities to act, so I feel very lucky that I still have a place where I can feel useful given that we’re in such a bizarre climate right now,” she said. “I’ve always been self-starting. Even if there weren’t opportunities, I would still be trying to invent new ideas, new stories, and new ways to tell stories.

“I’m in my mid-career, and I feel like I’m in act two. I’m just looking forward to seeing what I can do as a writer and director, and I’m curious to see what other roles that are out there that I haven’t quite tackled.”

Expect those roles to be both familiar and unexplored. For Krusiec, this is what she hopes her legacy in Hollywood ends up becoming – a blazed trail for future AAPI actors and actresses to follow.