Balancing Act
From ‘Fallout’ to Rice Theatre, Viola Hsia finds her stage.
Fall 2024
By Brandi Smith
Between filming her parts in Amazon Studios’ “Modern Love” and “Fallout,” Rice senior Viola Hsia sat on a bench in the Grove during her spring 2021 Owl Day visit. “I looked around to get a feeling of the campus,” says New York-raised Hsia, who had been searching for a university where she could balance her two loves of writing and acting. “I just thought, ‘Yeah, this is where I’m going to spend the next four years of my life — on this campus.’”
Now in her fourth year in the School of Humanities at Rice, the English and theater double-major has been involved on stage and behind the scenes of Rice Theatre productions, performed with the improv troupe Spontaneous Combustion, and served as assistant news editor for the Rice Thresher and as a managing coordinator for the Rice Players.
“I’ve loved my time at Rice,” Hsia says. “I’m nervous, sad and excited for my senior year.”
It comes just months after her appearance as Jamila opposite star Aaron Moten in Amazon’s breakout summer hit “Fallout.” Hsia filmed the Jonathan Nolan-directed episode in August 2022, missing several days as an O-Week adviser, then completed post-production work the following summer, just before the actors’ strike began.
“It’s been a very long process,” Hsia says, adding that she was thankful to her manager, agents and family for supporting her through it all. “I was really excited not only that it came out and I could talk about it for the first time in two years, but that people seem to really enjoy it and they really loved the show.”
Hsia, who’s been auditioning since she was 15, also appeared as Anna in the second season of “Modern Love.” At Rice, she’s honed her acting skills in a variety of Rice Theatre productions. “Rice Theatre has both broadened my experience and introduced me to a really close-knit community,” Hsia says. “It’s the community from the theater major that I value so much.”
“I really saw Viola in action when she auditioned and was cast in our production of ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee’ in spring 2022,” says Christina Keefe, director of the Rice Theatre program, noting that Hsia was terrific in the role. “Viola is always willing to take a risk and throw herself into whatever comes her way. She is super talented and a real leader in the class.”
Hsia says she fell in love with acting when she was 5 years old. Her love for writing developed just a few years later; she wrote her first script when she was 11. She has fostered that passion in her studies at Rice, including in English Professor Amber Dermont’s screenwriting course, where she’s writing a screenplay.
“She’s been kind enough to read the different iterations of it and offer feedback on revisions,” says Hsia,
who adds that she’s planning a new screenplay for her final senior project.
As for future roles or writing projects, Hsia remains as coy as her “Fallout” character: “It’s fun to let people be surprised.”
Christina Keefe is professor in the practice of theater and director of the Rice Theatre program in the School of Humanities. Amber Dermont is associate professor of creative writing in the School of Humanities.