The Sympathizer: How That “Mindfuck” of a Steakhouse Scene Came Together

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Sympathizer Episode 3, “Love It or Leave It.”]

The most buzzy aspect of HBO’s new drama The Sympathizer — Robert Downey Jr. playing a series of different characters — hits its peak in Episode 3, “Love It or Leave It.” And even cast member Sandra Oh had questions about one key sequence: During a roundtable interview with her, series star Hoa Xuande, and members of the press, she turned to Xuande mid-interview to ask about the details herself. “Did you rehearse all of it? Who did you start with?”

She was asking specifically about what cast and producers referred to as “the steakhouse scene,” where four of Downey’s different characters come together for an increasingly surreal conversation with The Captain (Xuande), a Vietnamese double agent trying to get his bearing in the chaos following the Vietnam War. Clear digital trickery is involved in bringing together Downey’s various personas — CIA agent Claude, Professor Hammer, filmmaker Niko, and Congressman Ned — for a sequence that required three days of shooting, but was essential to the production.

According to executive producer Susan Downey, “Robert never wanted [the multiple roles] to be some sort of gimmicky idea. He didn’t want it to just be, ‘Oh, this was my Peter Sellers moment. I need to have a real reason that a single actor’s playing these four roles.’”

That reason came, co-showrunner Don McKellar said, out of conversations about how “there’s this recurring motif in The Captain’s life — these sort of patronizing American establishment characters who offer The Captain something and offer to help him and then end up betraying him or being duplicitous. These extravagant sort of archetypes of the American establishment, who all work together, have a common interest, are all members of the same club, like we show in Episode 3. And so we were thinking, how do we evoke that? How do we show the complicity between these characters without, you know, slamming it on the head with dialogue?”

Hence, the multi-casting idea, which executive producer Niv Fichman said made the source material’s author Viet Thanh Nguyen jealous, because “he couldn’t do that in a book.”

The Sympathizer (HBO)