Jay Oliver Yip

As one half of Wolfpack Productions, which half do you do?
I’m a co-producer with Chris (Christopher Rithin), and I write and direct and act.

Have you always done all of them, or did you start as a writer or an actor first?
I started as an actor first. I never thought I’d have the balls to write or direct; I always came up with ideas and stories that I wanted to write or tell, so I’d always be looking for a writer in order to do that. But it always turns out that the best person to write your ideas is yourself, so I started dabbling. I did a couple of short script courses and I think it was hearing other people read out my work which gave me confidence to carry on writing.

I am far more insecure about people reading my work; I’ll be sweating if one person reads my stuff but I feel confident performing in front of thousands of people. I find it far more intrusive and personal. But, I think through practice, you build up that confidence and you can say, ‘actually, I think I know more than I thought I did.’ And I think writing’s very similar to acting anyway.

It’s exactly the same with directing. I never really felt confident, or that I could take on the responsibility of being in charge of a whole project. It wasn’t until we started Wolfpack, which allowed us to start creating our own things, that I put myself in that position and had many people come to me as the director.

So thankfully, that’s what Wolfpack has given me: that confidence to be a writer and director, even though I came from an acting background.

Do you come from a creative family?
No, not at all. I don’t know where it’s come from. My brother is quite creative, but he’s my younger brother so he went into photography and does have a very creative mind. We were both known at school for being drawers and sketchers. But I’ve got no idea where that’s come from at all.

So when you went to your family and told them you wanted to be an actor, what was their reaction?
My parents split up when I was around ten years old, so my Mum had more of an influence on our upbringing. She never used to give encouragement of ‘go and do whatever you want to do,’ but she was more like, ‘you know what, it’s your choice and I’m not going to tell you yes or no.’ Also, with my father being Asian, he had several catering businesses in Bristol, and I think the idea was for him to pass on the businesses to us, but it wasn’t forced on me.

When I did start training, [my father] didn’t really understand it. He came to watch me perform and I think he was like, ‘ok, he’s found something.’ But then obviously I was working in the restaurant as well, and he’d always say, ‘I want you and your brother to take over and manage the place.’ And I’d always be, ‘I can’t take my eye off the ball.’

For me, I don’t really believe in B plans. My Dad had a restaurant and takeaways, and for me to take that on board would’ve been a lot of work, which I wasn’t prepared to do. It was fine to have that as a part time job to help me pay the bills, but for me, [to have gone into] it would be like accepting that I wasn’t going to do plan A.

For ages, we had conversations about it in adulthood and he finally got it eventually.

I think it’s one of those things where, when my parents see me on tv or in magazines or whatever, they’re like, ‘there’s my son,’ but they don’t really see the graft or the business side of anything. I remember my uncle telling me once that I should take up economics because that pays more, which is a very Asian thing to say.

But I think that overall both my parents have been understanding with, you know, this is what I’ve chosen to do.

When did you decide to move to London?
I only moved to London three years ago when I met Chris. We were both doing a feature film in Bournemouth. It was a month’s shoot. The location, our base, and where we were staying was all in the same hotel so Chris and I spent a lot of time together in that month, along with our other friend, Ashley. I was sharing a flat with my brother in Bristol, and he decided to move to Korea to teach English, so I just fancied a bit of a change for myself. I told those guys that I was thinking of moving to London, and they both wanted to move, so we started to look for somewhere. I was always commuting from Bristol to London anyway for auditions, and I worked here far more than at home, so it just made sense really.

One of the challenges that I found when I was younger and acting was that there weren’t an awful lot of roles for east Asian actors, or as much open casting as there is now, although of course, there is still a lack of opportunity. Has that ever been a consideration for what you’re doing as far as your acting career is concerned?
Completely, 100%. Growing up, being mixed, and having my Mum who is Caucasian being a major influence, and me and my brother being the only South East Asians in the community where we lived, you kind of grow up thinking that you’re white like everyone else.

When you start training at an early age, you are pretty much cast in everything; it is open, colour blind casting because you are just working with your training crew. So I though that yes, I can play gangsters, I can play cowboys and Indians, because I can – that’s why I wanted to act.

So it wasn’t until I got to the end of my training that my course director said he thought it would really help if I trained in martial arts. And I completed respected him as a teacher, and I guess, well, it sounds odd to hear, particularly in today’s time, but I guess it’s a backhanded compliment way of saying that basically, because you’re east Asian, that’s your way into the industry.

When I graduated uni, a group of my friends started our own theatre company because we liked the way we were taught and we wanted to continue. We did that for five years and we got to a point where we wanted to do something different. I wanted to try doing a bit more screenwriting; that’s what made me fall in love with acting in the first place, and that’s why I wanted to be an actor.

Something that I’ve been very conscious about is equality and being able to open up as many doors for people like myself so there can be fair representation. I also take it on board as my responsibility. I think I’m very fortunate that, even when I was at college with my teachers there, even in my degree, I was taught very early and it was hammered into me that if you want to create something, at least have an impact, or a certain socioeconomic viewpoint. I’m not a doctor or a police person, I’m not doing anything constructive really in this world other than trying to tell stories. Therefore, for me, I take that quite seriously in trying to make a difference, in the stories that we tell, that they make a difference in the industry. So that’s a conscious effort that I make every time, giving opportunities to people who may not be fairly represented.

This also applies to the stories that we tell as well. Because I think we all recognise that, with any story that we tell, we could be anywhere, we could have people of any sexual orientation, or colour or culture or religion to be anything. But we’re not there yet, so we have to make those steps, and that’s what we do at Wolfpack.

With a bunch of the social posts that I’ve seen when you put up the behind the scenes for Wolfpack, it’s like, ‘we are proud x percent female, x percent whatever.’ Did you guys sit down and say, ‘ok, we’re consciously going to highlight this?’
Chris and I have had discussions along the way. For me, that’s always been an angle for me. I don’t think it’s enough to say, ‘we want to make something funny.’ For me, all the stuff we’re making is making some point, whether it’s political or not. That’s the whole point. And I think Chris and I agree on that: it gives us an edge to be able to do what we do.

I think the people who we are collaborating with have noticed that about Wolfpack, and I think that’s why we have this small team that we like to work with, particularly with the women in the group; they can be like, ‘hey, I have a great chance of writing or directing, or pitching something across.’

And that’s what’s great about #Sketchpack, that we do have different writers with different views. We’re able to create this platform to put these views across. For me, again, I want to have fair representation for everybody. I want a true mix of lots of different views.

The industry is such a small bubble anyway, and if you come down to London, it’s smaller, and if you go out to the regions it’s even smaller. I found that, as an east Asian actor, there was nothing for me to do in Bristol. It was still the same percentage of people doing all the same roles over and over again. There’s a lot of tv production stuff made in Bristol but it’s still all cast in London. So it didn’t make much sense for me to stay there.

Have you ever thought about going to Asia?
I have. With my father being from Hong Kong, I’ve been out quite a lot in the last couple of years. I’ve gone to some auditions whilst I’ve been out there, I have met with management and agents. I did consider it, even just for six months. I have been told, and what with being mixed, that there is a market for me. I don’t speak the language, so that would’ve been a sticking point for me. But I thought it would be handy for me to have management out there to do commercial stuff. But then I thought about theatre, tv and film and being in Hong Kong, I’d be sacrificing a lot of quality work; I’m confident I could work out there, but it’s more about the quality of work. Maybe being able to flip between the two would be handy.

Do you still do theatre? Are you attracted to one medium more than the others?
Well, on one hand, I just take whatever is paid – just not porn: I haven’t gotten to that stage yet. What attracted me to act was film. I remember when I was about 15 going to the Virgin Megastore and buying those 5 VHS for £30 deals. I built up these massive cupboards full of VHS tapes. Then they started doing DVDs and I became a bit of a film buff.

But through two years of my National Diploma, it was two years of theatre. When I came out of drama school and started working, the first things I got were theatre tours. But the attraction for me has always been screen.

I think that’s because on screen, you have all these moments that are blown up, and you can see the nuances of someone being there in the moment. And that’s what attracts me to watching the human condition. I think it’s similar for Chris as well, which is why we started to do a web show. Is it a bias? I’m not quite sure because I do still quite enjoy doing theatre.

I like being a student of the craft of acting, so for me it’s all about getting those moments when you are just living truthfully in the moment – that’s what turns me. When you do it once and you have to replicate it, you have the challenge of trying to keep it fresh every single time. I think with acting for camera, you can do ten takes and every single one of them could be different, and it is up to the editor and director which one they take. But with theatre, if you can create that freshness each time, that’s great; but it’s a lot easier to just say, well, I did that last night so I’ll do that again because it seems to work.

That’s what I enjoy with screen acting – I can do something completely brand new in that moment and never ever do it again. If I had to pick, it would be that.

What is it like working as part of a duo? Because I don’t think I’ve ever known you as just Jay, you’ve always been ‘Jay and Chris’ to me.
I think what’s great about me and Chris and Wolfpack is that we stumbled into a really good match that fit.

When Chris and I started writing Outside The Box, we just used to have our Macs set up in the front room. He’d write some bits, I’d write some bits, then he’d make suggestions and I’d make suggestions and somehow it all melded together. The flip side of that is that we’d miss quite a few things to make it a cohesive thing – it was quite obvious that I’d written some parts and Chris had written some other bits. However, as a working partnership, it really did work. Sometimes we would just go to the pub and get wasted and have all these ideas and that’s how it would start, and we’d go back and write it.

As we’ve progressed and matured, I’m now more the person that you go to for the writing and directing, and he is far more technical.

Chris hadn’t done any editing before Outside The Box. He sat and watched lots of YouTube clips and just taught himself. He became a great editor because he put all the hours in. You can see how well he has progressed through that. And the same for cameras. He has taught himself how to do that. I like work with human beings and coming up with ideas and stories, so it has naturally taken that path where he’s the technical person.

The hardest part of working together is being on the same page. Even though we do work very closely together we do have slightly different working patterns. I do like to shut off after a certain amount of time where as Chris will just power through until he gets tired. It probably means that he gets slightly ahead of me and I have to play catchup with correspondence and things like that. Also, we both work different schedules, so it’s quite easy to miss certain things.

Again, as you grow, and as the company grows, it’s just important to touch in with each other. We do occasionally have meetings at one in the morning because that’s what our timing is allowing us to do. But I think me and Chris do have a very good working relationship that seems to work. We do know and trust each other quite a lot, particular if we come as a director & DoP as well.

How do you decide what projects you’re going to make at Wolfpack?
Going back to the beginning with Outside The Box, there was three of us with Ashley. And the reason we wanted to write our own thing was because we were three actors.

Then Chris wrote the pilot for OTB, not intending it to be a serial, more like a short film, and also because he wanted to test out VFX. And somehow we came up with this idea of two flatmates who need a new flatmate so they make a robot. Then we thought, oh, that could be Ash.

In terms of #Sketchpack, that came out of us trying to work out the problem of have to be so constant with the content that you put out there. We’re so unlike the YouTuber thing; Chris and I were like, we don’t want to talk, we just want to be telling other stories, and that’s so much more difficult to be releasing content constantly. So then Chris was like, I want to do sketches – it’s a lot easier to film in a week and bang it out, and at least we can put them up regularly. I hated the idea to begin with, but the thing with me is that I really take my time with thinking about something.

The next day, I slept on it, and thought it was a really good idea. Actually, we used to do something very similar when I was training; we used to do a thing called Showtime every single week which was just a two minutes live performance in front of our class about something that we were doing at the time. I had a couple of friends who were schooled in something similar, and that’s how we started #Sketchpack.

For Midnight Miracle, Rebecca Jade Hammond came up with an idea, and it was quite flimsy; so she went away and talked to Alex Brammer and Barnaby Hatch got them involved, pitched it again and it was far more concrete. And I was like, ‘yes, you’ve sold me, I can totally see that.’ And for Chris it was a case of, ‘yes, we can do that.’ And from that point forward, for both of us, we haven’t been involved as directors, writers or actors.

So in so far as criteria is concerned, we’re very happy to be giving to those that we collaborate with very closely on their projects. Of course, we are both actors and we do want to progress that in front of the camera. So far with the four projects we’ve had, that’s a route into each one.

How much of your week does Wolfpack take up?
Chris will probably give you a different answer. I work five to six days in my normal job; we film at least once every two weeks, unless we’re working on a bigger project. I will probably spend at least an hour a day doing emails. As a writer now, Chris has given me deadlines as a producer, so I have to get something concrete to him. If I know I have something coming up I shut myself away for a weekend and try and get something down. Also, we have meetings. I’d say it’s at least half of our time; Chris probably puts in more hours than I do but he has a different work schedule, and as editor, that’s where he puts most of the time in.

It’s a pretty constant thing. When you’re at work, you look at your phone and you see three or four emails that you need to respond to immediately, so when you get a five minute break, you just take care of it.

I was trying to remember when I met you: I’m thinking it was the Daily Motion party (at Raindance 2014).
Yeah, and then Vidfest. We were taking naps under the table and then taking pictures.

Did you know anything about the web series community before you entered Raindance?
Absolutely nothing.

What was your impetus for entering Raindance?
Well, we put our show on YouTube; we just thought we could make something and people could see it. Then Chris said he wanted to enter it into festivals just to see what would happen, Raindance being one of them. We got in, and we got some nominations for a few of the smaller ones.

When went to Raindance, we were like, ‘wow, this is a business and there is a lot more thinking that you have to do around [your show].’ And that, for me, is how it started. I became much more aware about the business side of web content. And we just paid attention to this very supportive network.

So do you have an end game?
Yeah, I want to be the first Asian James Bond.