It was close to home for “Interior Chinatown” star Jimmy O. Yang, who played an unseen Chinatown extra in the new series. That’s because one of Yang’s first roles was “Chinese Teen #1.”

The irony helped him identify with his character, Willis Wu, and plays out in the series about a struggling Chinatown waiter who is drawn into investigating his brother’s disappearance, airing Tuesday on Hulu.

“Interior Chinatown,” based on the National Book Award-winning novel of the same name by Charles Yu, is technically a show within a show. The leads – Yang, Chloe Bennet and Ronny Chieng – play “Chinatown” characters within a police procedural called “Black and White.” They are largely ignored by everyone in the proceedings until the lights fade and the cameras disappear, returning viewers to the characters’ Chinatown reality.

In the show’s metaworld, Yang is a protagonist who plays a background character. His character, Willis, sneaks into “Black and White” by disguising himself as the techie and Chinese food delivery boy, using these stereotypes to his advantage.

“We’re being put in a box,” Yang said. “They expect you to know kung fu, they expect you to be a good student, or a model minority techie.”

For Yang, who has played mostly comedic roles, embodying multiple characters at once was creatively rewarding. “I love subverting expectations – that’s what the show is about, and that’s what my career is about,” Yang said.

He appreciates how the show lifts the curtain on the lives of sidelined characters, and how Chinatown is a metaphor for the way he believes America is flattening certain communities. “We get to see the facades, the Chinese words, the kitschy restaurants, but what you don’t normally see is behind the scenes,” he said.

Meanwhile, Chieng’s character, Fatty Choi, remains a defender of Chinatown. Although Willis learns to jump between the worlds of ‘Black and White’ and Chinatown, Fatty stubbornly refuses to leave the Chinese restaurant where the two friends work. “(Fatty) represents this idea of ​​not giving in to a white society that doesn’t even see you or want you around,” Chieng said.

Another character who navigates both worlds is Detective Lana Lee, played by Bennet. In “Black and White,” Lee is a biracial cop who is simultaneously treated as a valuable “Chinatown insider” and constantly dismissed as an outsider by her counterparts. Bennet said that as an actor she paid special attention to the lighting cues, wardrobe and the way Lana behaved in different contexts. “We were very strategic about emphasizing that I came from both worlds,” Bennet said. “Lana uses this kind of code-switching as a way to manipulate and deflect throughout the season.”

Bennet has publicly discussed how Hollywood struggles to understand her biraciality. She said playing a character who embodied her racial frustrations was a cathartic experience. “I felt so seen by the way Charlie (Yu) wrote her inner dialogue,” Bennet said. “I didn’t realize how much I needed to play her and how much of her story is still so relevant to my life.”

Chieng said that by satirizing Hollywood’s failures, the show makes a point about the larger society in which we live. He hopes viewers will walk away with more curiosity about the lives of people behind the scenes. “We need to pay attention to who is in the background, and recognize them as people with their own stories, their own tragedies and their own goals,” he said.