Lulu Wang wasnt sure if Expats was going to be the right move after the success of her 2019 film, The Farewell. After making its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and A24 picking it up, The Farewell became one of the most acclaimed films of that year. The movie was a deeply personal story that Wang fought hard to get made, resisting pressure from Hollywood executives to cater it to the white gaze .

That film took off in a way that I didnt expect at all. I did the opposite of what people said I should do, for the most part. Like, in order to appeal to a broader audience, make it more in English, cast a white person all of these things that I rejected, to make something really personal to me, Wang said in an interview last week, almost exactly five years since The Farewell premiered at Sundance. And so, it was just shocking. But I also heard [those choices] validated and I wanted to be back in a creative space where I could take risks and make those choices again.

During that whirlwind year, Nicole Kidman who had optioned novelist Janice Y.K. Lees The Expatriates to develop it into a series for Amazon approached Wang to see if she was interested in the adaptation. But Wang wondered if it might be the opposite of what she wanted to do next as a writer and director.

I didnt think that was going to be a space where I would have freedom to really stay small and make something against the grain and continue to look for my own voice, she said. And I told [Kidman] that. I said, Youre a huge star. This is Amazon doing a whole series, and its Hong Kong. This is a nuanced, complex place.

To her surprise, Kidman assured her she would have complete creative freedom, and Wang realized the scale of the project could be an asset.

So then, it became an opportunity that I couldnt say no to, because it just felt like suddenly this expanded world and platform where I could leverage the star power of Nicole Kidman and the resources of Amazon to tell a story about the Umbrella Movement, about domestic workers, about all of these people of color who are part of the diaspora of people in Hong Kong, she said.

Expats, a kaleidoscopic six-episode series that premiered Friday on Prime Video, does a lot we dont normally see on American television. The series retains the core characters of Lees novel: Margaret (Kidman), Hilary (Sarayu Blue ) and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), three very different American expat women living in Hong Kong, whose stories unexpectedly become connected through a horrific tragedy. Remarkably, Wang also expands the world of the show far beyond them, telling stories about the rich tapestry of people in Hong Kong and exploring thorny questions about race, class, colorism, religion, power and agency.