The Big Picture

Collider’s Steve Weintraub speaks with
Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld
creator Echo Wu and star Ali Wong.
Netflix’s Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld is a supernatural animated series about Jentry Chau, a Chinese-American teen navigating high school and battling creatures from the underworld.
In this interview, Wu and Wong discuss finding the character while recording, highlighting Chinese mythology with their creatures, and their favorite episodes.

Creator and executive producer Echo Wu’s new Netflix animated series Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld packs a literal punch. The show centers on Jentry Chau, voiced by Emmy Award-winner Ali Wong (Beef), a Chinese-American teen just trying to survive her Texas high school — and the demon king who’s gunning for her powers.

In addition to its beautiful animation and candy colors, Jentry Chau brings elements of horror and the supernatural, harking back to animated favorites like Over the Garden Wall or Danny Phantom. In the show, Jentry is battling monsters from the underworld while trying desperately to maintain her social status and navigate first loves. She isn’t going the road alone, however; the series also features an ensemble vocal cast with Bowen Yang (Saturday Night Live) as Jentry’s cohort, the ancient jiangshi Ed, and Lori Tan Chinn (Orange Is the New Black) as Jentry’s weapon-savvy aunt Gugu, as well as Lucy Liu (Charlie’s Angels), Jimmy O. Yang (Crazy Rich Asians), and more.

In this interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, Wu and Wong discuss finding the character throughout the recording process together, their favorite episodes, and working with a researcher on their Chinese mythology-inspired creatures. They also talk about why they’re so excited for viewers to tune in to their action-packed series, with Wong comparing it to X-Men: The Animated Series and Avatar: The Last Airbender and Wu admitting she really hopes a new generation finds their first crush in Jentry Chau’s cast of characters.

‘Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld’ Creator Echo Wu Does Believe in Ghosts
And she will fight you.

COLLIDER: I really want to start with congrats on the series. Echo, I want to start with you first. You’ve said you’ll “passionately argue with anyone who tries to tell me ghosts aren’t real.”

ECHO WU: Oh my god. [Laughs] Yes, you read that correctly.

Did you two ever get into any arguments over ghosts?

WU: No. I guess I never asked you. Do you believe in ghosts?

ALI WONG: I don’t think about it that much to have a passionate argument about it. But I’ll just be like, “Okay, sure. If you saw them. Okay.” But I know plenty of people, I grew up surrounded by people who believe in ghosts.

WU: I’m just like, “What reason do I have to lie to you that I saw a ghost,” you know?

WONG: My god, you didn’t tell me that you saw a ghost.

WU: I’ve seen ghosts.

WONG: Wow! Okay. I’m not going to put up a fight with you. She saw what she saw.

Totally.

How Ali Wong Found Jentry Through Her Voice
“There’s never enough crying.”
Image via Netflix

Ali, you’ve done a lot of voiceover work in the past. How did you two discuss figuring out the voice of Jentry, what you wanted her to sound like, and the energy level?

WONG: Gosh, it was a process, I would say. We definitely rerecorded a lot. I don’t even remember. There weren’t a lot of discussions. There were just sort of a lot of instinctive adjustments from Echo telling me to pitch it down or to sound younger because I can sound very mature.

WU: I think you always have had a really good, natural voice, and we started from that. The nuance of Jentry is that she is so multi-dimensional, so you have to go from cracking jokes one minute to having this very sincere conversation with Gugu the next minute. I think that it was the hardest part about finding someone who can have that kind of versatility, but I think besides that, you’ve always knocked it out of the park every time we’ve recorded.

WONG: A lot of quiet crying.

WU: We made her cry, like, every single time. There’s never enough crying.

WONG: Yeah, she’s under a lot of pressure!

Image via Netflix

Honestly, she is. I saw a number of the episodes. The first season has 13 episodes, so for both of you, which is your favorite and why?

WONG: I just love the image of the painted-skin creature so much. That was one of the first things that Echo showed me when she was pitching the show to me, and it looks almost identical to what you had drawn. But because Sheng Wang, a wonderful stand-up comedian and one of my best friends, the godfather of my children, voices one of the characters in the show, that episode is probably my favorite, just because hearing his voice through a completely different animated face will always make me laugh.

WU: I love him so much. I think he first appears in Episode 4. My favorite episode that came back was Episode 9. That was, I think, stunning because we did this really cool, fast-paced editing where it was intercutting between Chang summoning his daughter again, and then Jentry having the best time of her life at homecoming, and the juxtaposition between the two was kind of awesome. I’m really proud of that episode.

One of the things about the series is it moves pretty quickly in terms of storytelling. A lot happens. How much did you guys think about, “Oh, if we get to do three or four seasons, we know where we’re going,” and how much is it like, “Let’s just get through the first season and we’ll see what happens?”

WU: I’ve always really enjoyed fast-paced. It might just be the times, too. I have a very short attention span, and so I need things to be pretty fast-paced. But I have this thought of where Jentry will go going forward, too. It’s not so much about, “How much can we put in one season?” It’s really like she’s going to go through so much. She needs to have this growth in order to have multiple seasons where it feels satisfying to watch her on a journey.

Related Jentry Chau Has a Burning Secret in New ‘Jentry Chau vs The Underworld’ Trailer ‘Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld’ arrives on Netflix on December 5, 2024.

It’s 13 episodes. A lot of shows are six or eight or 10 episodes. Was it a Netflix decision to do 13? Was it story-based? How did you guys figure out that number?

WU: It’s partially that when I first pitched the show, I wanted to have, initially, 10 episodes made, and then the last three, we got to do, luckily. We treated it kind of like a movie a little bit, where there are three acts that really round out the final journey and the arc. I think we did a really beautiful job because if we didn’t have those three episodes, we wouldn’t have had such a satisfying end to Gugu and a beginning to Jentry. So, I’m really happy with the number of episodes we landed on.

‘Jentry Chau vs. the World’ Creator Echo Wu Wants You to Fall In Love
Image via Netflix

For both of you, what are you both so excited for audiences to see with this series?

WONG: I’m a huge fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender and I grew up also watching X-Men [The Animated Series], the original — I heard X-Men ‘97 is great; I haven’t watched it. But those were animated shows that I could watch that adults and kids could watch together. And as a parent of two kids, you watch a lot of animated content that you’re not a fan of, and you kind of just treat it as a nanny for your children while you do laundry and take out the trash and stuff. So, this is one of those shows that I hope parents can tune into with their kids and squeeze each other when it’s scary and talk about, and just enjoy together and have a real, authentically fun, exciting experience.

WU: So, I have a very selfish want. I want people to have their first cartoon crush with this show. That was my only dream. I want people to fall in love with the show, obviously, but I also want people to experience what it was like when we watched things like X-Men and Avatar and really fall in love with a world and also have a cartoon crush. I think that would be awesome.

I think that would be fantastic. It’s also weird to think about how there will be people out there where this will be the first animated thing they watch. It’s crazy to think about, but it’s true.

WU: Yeah. I’m trying to remember the first animated thing I watched…

WONG: King Triton. That’s very public that that’s mine. [Laughs] I’ll say it since you asked.

WU: Mine was, like, Teen Titans, probably, and a lot of Magic Girl anime — CardCaptors and Sailor Moon and stuff. They’re a really big impact on the show.

‘Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld’ Enlisted Professional Help for the Creatures
“If you look closely, you’ll see a lot of Chinese mythology…”

I love learning the behind-the-scenes and the making of things. What do you think might surprise people to learn about the making of the show?

WONG: Gosh, we had a researcher on the show.

WU: We did, a cultural consultant.

WONG: She has a PhD in everything, and she was so smart. So, all of the creatures were really thought out, very discussed, heavily discussed, with very rich backgrounds, but that have a lot of authenticity to them.

WU: Yeah, she was a great help. I think that is a good point because the show has a lot of Easter eggs in it. If you look closely, you’ll see a lot of Chinese mythology splayed out in Gugu’s lair, or name drops here and there of mythological creatures from all of the different kinds of Chinese mythology stories. So, if you have an eagle eye, you’ll see a lot of some of your favorite things that pop culture has popularized.

Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld is now streaming on Netflix.

Your changes have been saved Jentry Chau vs the Underworld A Chinese-American teen living in a small Texas town finds out a demon king is hunting her for the supernatural powers she’s been working her whole life to repress.Release Date December 5, 2024 Creator(s) Echo Wu

Watch on Netflix