The Season is set to take Disney+ and Hulu by storm this month.
Starring Jessie Mei Lei as Cola, the new series is set in Hong Kong during the boating season, when all the elite gather and messiness ensues. Everyone is there for a purpose, and keeping up appearances is extremely important. Whether everyone will last the season – well, that is to be determined, especially with lots of secrets afoot and scathing details threatened to be revealed.
Joining Li in The Season are Karena Lam, Toby Stephens, Celina Jade, Yvonne Chapman, Kōki, Chris Pang, Lee Jae-yoon, Carl Ng, Reina Sawai, Xyza Cada, Claire Lovering, and Lincoln Younes.
Ahead of the show’s release, I had the amazing opportunity to chat with Jessie Mei Li about her character, Cola (and her messy decisions), the page-turning script, filming in Hong Kong, and much more!
Watch the full interview with Jessie Mei Li for The Season below:
An element of the series I loved was that all the characters had messiness to deal with, and ultimately, they were allowed to be messy. So, I wondered what Li thought when she first got the script and learned about her character, Cola, and her journey.
Li said, “Well, yeah, I got the script, and I think they sent me the first three episodes. And you know, often I get a lot of scripts, and I’m like, ‘Yeah…’ [shrug], but this one I was like, ‘More! More!’ I needed to know, it was so addictive, and I get to the first episode, I have to know more, and then at the end of episode three, I was just like, ‘How can you leave me like this? I need to know what happens.’”
Of course, it always helps that you enjoy the character you’re portraying. Thankfully, Li had that experience and referred to Cola as “an interesting character.”
Li shared, “I absolutely loved Cola. I thought she was such an interesting character, because she genuinely, like, you know – I think she’s allowed to be a real person and like real people, she genuinely believes she’s doing the right thing, and that’s a really interesting place to come from as a character, you know? She really believes she’s in the right, but she does all these like heinous things, and I just thought it would be really interesting to get into that headspace.”
The series explores many themes, including grief and loss, which can be difficult to take on as an actor. So, I asked Li what it was like to prepare for those more emotionally charged moments in the show.
Li explained, “I mean, we had such an amazing director on our show, Marialy [Rivas], who I love, and she was, you know, I couldn’t have done it without her. She was really, really – her ideas about Cola, and the way she would like shift and change my ideas, and we worked together so well, because, you know, I had a lot of – I thought, in order for us to, we have to like Cola a little bit, you know? You can’t be out-and-out unlikable because she’s, you know, we have to be on her side, kind of. And so I had this idea of her being this quite wounded child, you know? This like wounded girl.”
Li continued, “But this whole idea from Marialy and from our writers and stuff that she was like this warrior, and then it was coming out in this like fierceness, and this solid, you know, she’s unflappable. She keeps eye contact, she’s not afraid, and it is a mask, but it was less of the kind of softness that I was bringing originally when I first thought about the character. So it was – it was actually a lot of it was maintaining kind of like a cool, calm facade. That was the challenge, because you know you can feel the feelings, you can feel the betrayal and the upset and the pain, but it’s like, how does Cola hide that from everyone? And that’s what made it really interesting for me.”
The setting of Hong Kong takes the series to new heights. It’s beautiful, and really, it’s a character in itself. Filming in Hong Kong was one of the reasons Li wanted to work on The Season.
Li shared, “It was like one of the main reasons I wanted to do the show. Like, when it came through, I was like, ‘Filming in Hong Kong? Are you joking?!’ I was like, ‘I have to go.’ My family is from Hong Kong, but I haven’t really spent any time there, and I love food, so it was, you know, I was like, I have to do this. It was amazing, and it was really for me, as like a mixed race person, and having like always longed so much to spend time in Hong Kong, and to get to know my culture a bit better, and like see where my parents used to live when they lived in Hong Kong, and like get to know the city and people, it was – it was magical, it really was.”
Li was also excited to experience the “high flying atmosphere” of Hong Kong and, of course, the delicious food scene.
Li said, “And because there’s so much of like old Hong Kong that I kind of knew about from my family, but also this kind of like crazy multicultural, like high flying atmosphere that was so different from my normal life, like I’m pretty chill, and then Hong Kong is like go, go, go, so it was an experience, it was exhausting, but I loved it, and I ate so much, everything, which was the best part.”
Lastly, I asked if there was something from the character that Li learned or would take away from portraying Cola.
Li replied, “I think, yeah. Do you know what I think? There was an element of hardness that I learned from this character, and of, like, you know, being bold. Like I feel – like even just more recently, I’m currently doing a play here in London, and my character is very bold, and I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m bold in these ways; I’m bold in my own way. But I think there’s a sort of a – Cola just when she wants something, she goes, and she gets it, and she’s afraid, but she works through it. And, like, I do think I learned from that, because, you know, filming this was tough, it was a stressful shoot. The best, like, the best time, but it was a lot, and I think, yeah, I gained some kind of like mental and physical fortitude from Cola for sure.”
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