Jess Hong is, by her own admission, “not a science person.” She is much more at ease explaining the actions required to perform a Shakespearean death—“we had a fake, hard rubber dagger, [and] when Juliet stabs, I burst the blood bag with my other hand, so that you get the full spurting out of blood”—than she is talking particle physics.
But on 3 Body Problem, the sprawling Netflix sci-fi series about an impending alien invasion which promises to upend the lives of everyone on Earth, Hong plays Jin Cheng, a wildly-driven theoretical physicist and one of the “Oxford Five,” a group of college friends-slash-geniuses particularly affected by the looming alien threat. As Jin, Hong is responsible for convincingly delivering convoluted dialogue about getting a probe to one-percent light speed and other such complex endeavors. “I did want to get at least a foundational understanding [of the physics involved] so…I could communicate the intention,” she says. “Like, why are we doing this?”
