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No surprise, I thought, as I disposed of the 12-volt charging adapter I had purchased for my car. I’d bought the thing on Temu, the Chinese low-cost-shopping app, as part of a larger haul of random other stuff that the app had marketed to me: chargers to plug into my adapter and car-seat gap-filler crumb-catchers to flank them.

The charger cost $2.43 and took weeks to arrive. Because it came from China, I knew I had no hope of returning it, but $2.43 is less than a Diet Coke these days, so who cares? It turned out I cared, because I wanted to use the gadget to charge things. So I felt disappointment, though not affront, when the gizmo’s plastic pins broke loose mere days after arrival, making the device unusable. I should have just bought a Diet Coke instead.

This week, Amazon announced a new store, Amazon Haul, that hopes to compete with Temu, Shein, and other purveyors of such items. When I opened Haul, which is available only on Amazon’s mobile app, it presented me with an array of “unbelievable finds” at “crazy low prices”: a $3.99 table runner; a pair of blue-and-white zebra-printed women’s swim bottoms for $5.99; a barrage of smartphone cases as low as $2.99; a $2.99 set of foundation brushes; a $2.99 silicone sink strainer; two dozen cork-bottomed chair-leg floor protectors for $6.99.

Temu and Shein have been popular for a long time. But Amazon’s entry into this market officially makes it mainstream. The result isn’t just “low cost” shopping, but a different kind of shopping. Now people buy low-quality goods that they don’t necessarily expect to use, and knowing full well that they’re maybe worthless, for the experience of having bought them.

Of course, people have always shopped just to shop: to hang out at the mall, to experience the relief of retail therapy, to adopt the identity of a label or a style, to pass the time between events. But the internet changed shopping. First, e-commerce made it more standardized and efficient. Instead of fingering through the garments on a rack or rummaging through a discount bin, shoppers clicked product images set against stark white backgrounds. They searched for keywords, which assumed that shopping was driven by need rather than desire. Shopping became more rational, more structured.

[Read: Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk?]

It consolidated, too. Amazon.com became a so-called everything store, and others, including Walmart.com, followed suit. They offered consumers, well, everything; people no longer needed to visit specialized websites. Then online sellers deployed algorithmic recommendations to steer shoppers toward goods that might benefit the sellers or that might lead buyers to buy more. Slowly, over years, online shopping became disorienting. When I recently searched Amazon for a 16x16 gold picture mat, I was shown a family of products, none of which was a 16x16 gold picture mat. The one I finally bought took forever to arrive—it was not eligible for Prime shipping—and was damaged in transit. I wish I’d made different choices, but which ones? I couldn’t find this product in a local store, and I wasn’t willing to pay for a custom-made one from a specialty shop. This experience is now commonplace. I buy things online that I fully expect to be unfit for purpose, necessitating their return (which has become its own kind of hell). Now shopping neither satisfies a need nor sates a desire. It burns up time and moves money around.

Haul is the perfect name for a habit that contributes to this feeling. On early YouTube, circa the mid-aughts, beauty vloggers seeking topics for vlogging started sharing the goods they had recently purchased, online or in person. They produced what became known as “haul videos.” Eventually, as vloggers gave way to influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and elsewhere, direct sponsorships, feed advertisements, and other incentives drove haul or haul-adjacent content: People would make money for posting it.

Shein started recruiting these influencers to promote its service in the West. The products it sold were so cheap, it didn’t really matter if they were any good. One decent fast-fashion top or accessory out of a $20 haul was still cheaper than Abercrombie or American Eagle. Soon enough, you couldn’t even go to those stores anyway, because of pandemic lockdowns; by 2022, Shein accounted for half of fast-fashion sales in the United States. Shopping became a kind of gambling: Roll the dice and hope that you come out a winner, whatever that would mean.

[Read: Amazon returns have gone to hell]

Showing off has always been a part of shopping, but hauls set use aside entirely, replacing it with exhibition. For the YouTuber or Instagram influencer, it wasn’t important if the clothing or skin-care products were useful or even used, just that they afforded the content creator an opportunity to create content—and, potentially, to get paid by sponsors to do so. Not everyone is an influencer, but lots of people wished to be, and dressing for the job you wanted started to entail hauling as a way of life. Shein, Temu, and now Amazon Haul encourage bulk purchases to justify low costs and minimize freight, while slipping in under the $800 threshold of U.S. import tax. These shops made the haul a basic unit of commerce.

At the same time, Chinese sellers—including some that appear to sell the very same goods found on Shein, Temu, Alibaba, and more—began to dominate Amazon’s third-party-seller platform, known as Marketplace. By 2023, Amazon acknowledged that nearly half of the top 100,000 Marketplace sellers were based in China. If you’ve ever searched for goods and been presented with weird, nonsense-name brands like RECUTMS (it’s “Record Your Times,” not the other thing), these are likely China-based Marketplace sellers. For some time now, cheap products of questionable quality and dubious fitness for purpose have dominated Amazon search results—especially because those sellers can also pay for sponsored ads on Amazon to hawk their wares.  

Amazon Haul closes the gap between normal e-commerce and the haul retail that social-media influencers popularized. Now ordinary people can get maybe-useful, maybe-garbage goods purchased for little money in bulk.

Great to have the choice, perhaps. But likely also irritating, because the phone case, table runner, or makeup brush you might purchase that way are probably garbage. Nobody is hiding this fact—thus Amazon’s carefully chosen language of “unbelievable finds” and “crazy low prices,” and not “high-quality goods.” And consumers are now ready to expect crap anyway, having spent years buying random wares from Instagram ads, TikTok shops, Shein, or the discount manufacturers that dominate Amazon itself. When I open a box that arrives at my door, I don’t really expect delight anymore. Instead, I hope that what’s inside might surprise me by bearing any value at all.

Haul might sound like the latest curiosity of concern only to the very online, but it could be an omen. Over time, Amazon has devolved from an everything store that sold stuff I liked and wanted into a venue for bad things that don’t meet my needs. Haul is just one way to shop, not the only way. But that was also true of Marketplace, which slowly took over Amazon’s listings. For now, you can still buy what you want or think you do. But eventually, hauls could take over entirely, and all shopping could become a novelty-store, mystery-grab-bag experience.

Photographs by Justin Chung

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity. During his first day on set, although he had only two lines, he asked Mike Judge, one of the show’s creators, whether his character should speak with a Mandarin accent or a Cantonese one. Judge was stumped. “I just said, ‘Oh, well, which one’s more natural to you?’ ” Judge told me. Yang, who’d grown up in Hong Kong, worried that a Cantonese accent was too generic; American viewers might recognize it from Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movies. Because Mandarin is more standard for official and professional contexts, it can sound more formal, and Yang thought this made sense for an ambitious immigrant like Jian-Yang. Judge told me that he now doesn’t remember which accent Yang chose; “I was just glad he was paying that much attention,” he said.

The show’s writers expanded Yang’s role, and he eventually became a series regular, reshaping his character into a sly villain whose befuddled exterior disguises an inner ruthlessness. To deepen his performance, Yang developed a mantra, which he would say to himself in Mandarin before every take: “Wŏ bù zhī dào,” or “I don’t know.” He drew this mantra from his own experience dealing with his parents. “Even when I know something, and they’re like, ‘Why is Netflix not working?,’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ ” He grinned at me conspiratorially. “Because I just don’t care to fix it.” That’s how Jian-Yang operates too, Yang said: “I think Jian-Yang knows; he just doesn’t really give a shit.”

And yet, for many viewers, none of this character work mattered. As Silicon Valley grew in popularity, Jian-Yang became the subject of scorn for some Asian viewers and critics, who called out the show’s writers for peddling a caricature of an Asian immigrant with heavily accented, error-prone English. In 2017, a Wired review called him an example of “toxic Asian stereotypes.”

Yang found these reactions exhausting. “It’s like, wow, this is such a big deal for me, and I’m becoming, back in those days, one of the few Asians on TV,” he told me. “But you’re all going to hate on me?” He felt a familiar anguish. The only roles offered to him were goofy sidekicks and background parts, but even when he tried to make characters like Jian-Yang as rounded and complicated as possible, he felt he couldn’t win. “I didn’t understand the beef against Asian accents,” he said. He gets why Asian Americans are sensitive to such portrayals, given Hollywood’s long history of stereotyping, but some of the criticism, he said, felt “a little overblown and a little dumb.” “There’s a constant foreigner bit,” he explained, referring to the industry’s tendency to exoticize Asian characters. “But I was a foreigner.”

Despite the controversy around the character, Jian-Yang ultimately launched Yang’s career. In 2018, the year before Silicon Valley ended its run, he appeared in the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, a box-office hit now considered a watershed moment for Asian cultural representation. This November, Yang is starring in Hulu’s Interior Chinatown, which feels like a different kind of milestone. Adapted from Charles Yu’s National Book Award–winning novel of the same name, the series tells the story of Willis Wu, a background actor on a generic police procedural set in an unnamed city’s Chinatown. For Yang, the role is more than a chance to be a leading man; it also uncannily mirrors his own life. Willis is stuck in small, clichéd parts, juggling Hollywood’s biases and his own ambition, trying to figure out who exactly he wants to be.

Top: Yang as Bernard in Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Bottom: As Jian-Yang in Silicon Valley (2019). (© Warner Bros. Pictures / Everett Collection; Ali Paige Goldstein / © HBO / Everett Collection)

When Yang first emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, at age 13, the move left him dazed. He was one of a handful of Chinese kids at his school, and he barely spoke English. “I was like, ‘Guys, you’re speaking way too fast; I can’t,’ ” he told me. After two years, his mother got a job in Shanghai and left the family behind to return to China, where she stayed for the next decade. Without her, Yang became even more adrift.

His father, meanwhile, embraced their new American life. He celebrated their arrival by buying a Pontiac Grand Am. “He thought it was so fucking cool because we always had, like, Honda Accords, in Hong Kong,” Yang told me. “Then he was like”—Yang launched into an impression of his dad, puffing out his chest, his voice going gravelly—“ ‘American six cylinder, baby! This is great!’ ”

Yang worked hard to assimilate to his new surroundings. In Hong Kong, he’d played competitive Ping-Pong and watched kung fu shows on TV. In Los Angeles, he became interested in basketball and football. He fell in love with American television—Bobby Lee on Mad TV, Ken Jeong on Live in Hollywood. He got into hip-hop and tried to build his identity around music, but still felt like he was faking it. “I wasn’t trying to not be Asian,” he said. “I was just trying to be either funnier or catch a football or something so I could fit in.”

Yang began creating what he now calls a “locker” in his mind, where he hid his former self away so he could “make space in my brain to remember American stuff.” He compartmentalized so successfully that he’s had “a weird memory lapse” about his pre-California childhood in Hong Kong.

When Yang arrived at UC San Diego in 2005, the school’s student body was 37 percent Asian, a higher percentage than any other ethnic group. After years of trying to fit in with his Los Angeles classmates, he found it disorienting to suddenly be one among many. “I’m like, I actually want to stand out,” he said. “I don’t want to be grouped in with all of the Asians.” He grew his hair long and started skateboarding and smoking weed, anything to avoid seeming like a stereotype. But he also worried about disappointing his parents, both of whom had practical jobs—his father was a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, and his mother worked in retail—so he pursued an economics degree and interned at a financial-consulting firm.

Then, one summer night before his last year of college, he paid $5 on a whim to do five minutes of stand-up at an open-mic night in North Hollywood. Onstage, he found that joking about his identity somehow alleviated the strain of feeling like an outsider. “They didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t ‘Jimmy’; I was just the next comedian up, this guy who looks Asian,” he said. “They didn’t come to see me, so it’s almost like I have to address, like, ‘Hey, yeah, I know I’m Asian. This is my experience.’ ”

Yang was more than willing to lean into stereotypes. His early stand-up included an impression of an Asian guy trying to hit on a girl: “Let me holler at you! Come back; I’ll do your nails for you,” he’d say in an exaggerated accent. In another bit, he joked about the lack of Asians on The Maury Povich Show. “You never see some dude walking down the steps of shame and being like, ‘Look, Maury, look. I got small eye; he got big eye. That not my baby, Maury.’ ”

Yang had a relaxed, good-natured stage presence. But these bits were, as he put it, “hacky Asian stuff.” He was happy to confirm audiences’ biases if it made them laugh. Around that time, he started using the handle @FunnyAsianDude for his social-media accounts.

To make a living, he worked as a used-car salesman during the day and as a strip-club DJ at night. The latter “combined the salesmanship I learned in the used-car lot with the microphone skills I’d learned doing stand-up,” he told Conan O’Brien years later. Yang turned down an offer for a cushy finance job, against his father’s wishes, in favor of pursuing open-mic nights. He also began auditioning for TV shows and movies, going out for pretty much any casting call that would have him, as he wrote in his 2018 memoir: “Loud Japanese host,” “Weird Korean Jogger guy,” “Video Game addict.”

“You don’t want to be in a box, but at the same time, when you’re first starting, it’s easy to just be like, ‘Hey, I’m an Asian actor. Call me if you need an Asian actor,’ ” he said. Even after landing his guest role on Silicon Valley, he put his earnings into a used car he could drive for Uber, to make a little more cash.

Then, months after he finished filming the first season, in 2014, HBO offered him a contract to be a series regular. When he got the call, he was killing time on the trolley that rolls through the Grove, an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles. He rode the trolley back and forth in disbelief, feeling like “the gate’s opened,” like he was finally a “real player now in this industry.” He called his dad, who said, in Yang’s words: “Oh, okay, so you have an employment contract with HBO, which is a company. Good. Thank God.”

In person, Yang is warm and easygoing, with an approachable air. One afternoon this summer, we met for lunch at a Thai restaurant in L.A. As soon as he sat down, a woman leaned over and stopped him mid-sentence. “Are you the famous guy?” she asked.

“Probably not,” he said. She laughed and held up her phone for a selfie anyway.

Yang could have taken offense that the woman seemed to view him as just a vaguely familiar face; he wouldn’t have been the first Asian actor to be confused with another one. (In his 2020 comedy special on Amazon Prime, Good Deal, he joked about fans who approach him, looking anxious. Are you sure that’s not Ken Jeong? he imagines them wondering.) But when I brought up the incident the next time we met, over dim sum in Monterey Park, he laughed, unbothered. He’s accustomed to this particular kind of fame, to being “that guy I’ve seen before.” It’s a long way from where he started.

Since Yang began his career, in the early 2010s, opportunities for Asian actors have exploded—a surge that Yang attributes largely to the success of Crazy Rich Asians. In that movie, a young Chinese American woman goes to Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s family, and is thrown into the high-flying milieu of Asia’s ultra-wealthy. As the playboy Bernard, Yang found a desperate streak beneath his character’s bravado. When the film became a global hit in 2018, it was hailed as proof that Asian-led projects could find commercial success in Hollywood. In 2020, the Korean movie Parasite swept the Oscars; in 2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once, led by Yang’s Crazy Rich Asians co-star Michelle Yeoh, did the same. A study published by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that the percentage of Asian characters with speaking parts in the top-grossing films each year climbed from roughly 3 percent in 2007 to nearly 16 percent in 2022. Asians were the only minority group to see such a big increase in that period.

At the same time, more Asian writers and directors were getting the opportunity to create their own work, which gave rise to a range of Asian characters who are delightfully eccentric but also specific and human. Now there are far fewer roles like the Jian-Yang of early Silicon Valley, and more roles like, say, Steven Yeun and Ali Wong’s deranged, obsessive duo in Beef, the Emmy-winning drama about a road-rage incident that escalates into a murderous feud. As Jeong, who also appeared in Crazy Rich Asians and has become a close friend of Yang’s, put it to me: “There’s more diversity in our diversity now.”

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

This doesn’t mean that choosing roles was suddenly easy for actors like Yang. Not long after Crazy Rich Asians, he got sent a script for a movie about William Hung, who’d become an early viral sensation after an awkward 2004 American Idol audition during which he gyrated and sang Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” off-key. The writer wanted Yang to play Hung. It was a starring role in a potentially splashy biopic—but Yang turned it down. In June 2020, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he told Rogan that the script made him want to “fucking vomit”; Hung, he said, had “set us back 10 years.” In response, Hung posted a video addressed to Rogan and Yang. “I understand where you might be coming from, because you’re not the only person who believes that I portray Asian stereotypes,” Hung said. But, he added, “I believe everyone has a right to try something new without being judged or ridiculed.”

When I brought up his comments about Hung, Yang grimaced. His objection to the project, he told me, was not about Hung himself but rather about the way the script missed an opportunity to examine why he’d become famous and how his notoriety had affected the perception of Asian Americans, especially Asian men. “People made fun of him,” Yang said. “He was the butt of the joke, and every one of us was called ‘William Hung’ in high school for a couple years.” To Yang, the way American Idol portrayed Hung—how the show “threw him out there, and how America ganged up and laughed at him—that should be the story we’re telling.” Many Asian performers still find it hard to shake the fear that they’ll be turned into a punch line the way Hung was. “In hindsight,” Yang said of those 2020 comments, “I think that was my own frustration, my own insecurity.”

For Asian actors living through this cultural sea change, career choices can seem freighted with a new sense of responsibility and, occasionally, feelings of guilt. I spoke with Jeong about what is arguably his most well-known role, the Chinese gangster Mr. Chow in the 2009 comedy The Hangover. To Jeong, Mr. Chow was “puncturing the stereotype, because there are not a lot of stereotypes where, you know, an Asian man jumps out naked on Bradley Cooper’s shoulder and beats him up.” Still, some things about Mr. Chow now seem to give him pause, including his exaggerated accent. “I haven’t done an accent on live TV since,” he told me. “And there’s a reason for that.”

When I mentioned this to Yang, he shrugged and sighed. “Yeah, yeah, and that’s his battle,” he said. As much as Yang admires Jeong, his own view of what makes for “good” representation seems somewhat different. He doesn’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with an Asian character who has a thick accent, and he doesn’t think breaking down stereotypes requires playing a kind of character audiences have never seen before. He’d be interested in a role that seemed like an Asian cliché—say, a mathematician—if it surprised him. “Is there some more interesting angle about the man?” he said. “Or is it just super one-dimensional: ‘Here’s an Asian guy good at math’?” The question he asks himself about each character now is simple: “Is it human?”

Yang’s stand-up comedy has evolved, too. He still riffs on being Asian, but his material is more precise, and more personal. In his 2023 special for Amazon Prime, Guess How Much?, he jokes about the frugality of his mother, with whom he’s grown close again after their long separation. (She loves a bargain; he says her catchphrase is “Guess how much?”) He still plays with stereotypes, but now he has a knack for turning them on their head: Joking about the global rise of K-pop, he says, “I had a 15-year-old white kid come up to me, trying to explain the different members of BTS … I’m like, ‘Dude. They look the same to me.’ ”

Last year, Yang changed his Instagram handle from @FunnyAsianDude to just @jimmyoyang. “If I log on every day on Instagram, I see ‘Funny Asian Dude,’ I’m saying that to myself over and over again: I’m only the funny Asian,” he told me. “But I think I’m more than that. And I could be more.”

In Interior Chinatown, Willis lives in a crowded apartment complex and works as a waiter at a restaurant called the Golden Palace while dreaming of becoming a “Kung Fu Guy.” What Willis doesn’t fully understand is that he’s actually a background actor—otherwise known as a “Generic Asian Man”—in a procedural called Black & White, which is occasionally set in the Golden Palace. (The show within the show stars a Black male detective and a white female detective, who flirt and banter with unrelenting cop-show swagger.) Over time, Willis becomes entangled in the plot of Black & White, landing bigger and bigger roles, and gradually realizing that he’s been trapped inside a Hollywood stereotype all along.

The first episode opens with Willis witnessing an incident related to a crime that Black & White’s detectives are investigating. He starts to notice the strangeness of his circumstances and, with the help of a new-to-town cop, he searches for his long-lost brother, a Kung Fu Guy who may know more about what’s going on.

Yang as Willis in Interior Chinatown (2024) (Mike Taing / Disney)

Charles Yu’s novel is structured like a screenplay, with stage directions full of character descriptions and lyrical digressions. Yu, who is also an executive producer, told me that he wrote the book in part to untangle his anxieties about the way cultural depictions of Asian people have influenced his perception of himself. “Like, Is this face lovable? ” he said. “Do we deserve to be characters, let alone main characters?” He wanted the mechanics of Willis’s world to reflect Hollywood’s narrow logic about race.

The novel is so high-concept that adapting it for the screen was a gamble for Hulu. But the series cleverly uses the tools of television to render the layered realities of the book. The lights in the Golden Palace darken to indicate when Black & White is filming and Willis has entered that world. When Willis goes from being Interior Chinatown’s star to Black & White’s Generic Asian Man, the show challenges the audience to find him again, somewhere in the background of its shots.

And the book’s central metaphor has been made usefully concrete. On the day I visited the set of Interior Chinatown, Yang was filming a scene, invented for the show, that required him to repeatedly run into a pair of doors. The doors lead to the police precinct, the setting for Black & White’s highest-stakes subplots, where Generic Asian Men like Willis are not allowed. Willis is largely a dramatic role, but there are moments of physical comedy, and Yang was clearly having fun with this one. He improvised different takes: He tailgated a group of people, trying to sneak in behind them—blocked. He sidled up to the doors as if he could trick the inanimate wooden panels into staying ajar—blocked again. He took a running start, falling right before he reached the threshold.

When Yang first read the script for Interior Chinatown, he thought of all the ways in which he’d lived Willis Wu’s life. He’d looked for jobs as a background actor by calling Central Casting, the same agency that employs Willis; he’d even worked at a restaurant called Chop Suey in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. But Yang also thought that Interior Chinatown, with its self-awareness and depth, was a new kind of story.

He found a shirt that he’d worn in his 20s, when he still worked as a waiter, and smeared it with chili oil. He put on the scuffed-up Goodwill boots he’d worn back then, too. Then, in a hotel room, he auditioned for Willis over Zoom. In the scene Yang read, the reality-bending mechanics of Black & White are absent. Instead, Willis has a difficult conversation with his father, reluctantly admitting that he feels unmoored in life, and asking for advice, only to get stern replies.

At first, Yang had trouble evoking Willis’s emotions, and worried that he was forcing his tears. Then the episode’s director, Taika Waititi, stepped in. Waititi urged Yang to think about how Willis’s real motivation is to leave the conversation, but he stays out of some helpless instinct: to oblige his father, maybe, or because he’s holding on to the hope that he’ll hear what he wants to hear—that his father understands Willis’s angst. The note evoked a memory for Yang; as a teenager, he’d struggled to communicate his feelings to his father, because when he did, he found it hard to bottle those feelings back up again. “When I was younger,” he told me, “and I’d ask my dad about my mother—like, ‘Why did she move to Shanghai?’—I couldn’t help but start uncontrollably sobbing.”

Yang realized that Willis’s dynamic with his father was one he knew well: the push and pull between wanting to say everything and holding back, the emotional gulf that can stretch between an immigrant father and his more assimilated son. “I don’t know anyone who embodies better a bunch of the feelings and anxieties, and insecurities, that are part of why I wrote the book,” Yu told me of Yang.

If Yang’s relationship with his father was once more strained, lately that has changed. Richard Ouyang has been so encouraged by his son’s success that he recently started auditioning for roles himself. Ouyang told me that Yang now gives him professional advice: “Jimmy always asks me to be more serious about acting and take some classes,” Ouyang wrote by email. “Yet I think I am too old to learn any new tricks and prefer to be a Nepo Daddy!” In May, father and son did an ad for Toyota together, with Ouyang dryly complaining about his son’s driving skills as they navigate a snowy wilderness. “It was so cute—he was so stoked,” Yang said of his father. “He posted it all over his Chinese social media.”

Yang has also reconnected with the younger self he’d placed inside that mental locker back in 2000. His childhood comes rushing back at certain moments: when he smells stuffed fish cakes like the ones he used to eat with his mother at the shop near their Hong Kong apartment; when he’s speaking Cantonese; and, sometimes, when he performs. Playing Willis helped him rediscover, he said, “stuff that I’ve taken for granted, that I’ve forgotten”—the memories of who he was before.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Against Type.”

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