In my line of work, it’s not every day that I’m asked to talk about myself. But this is exactly what happens the moment I jump on a Zoom call with Élodie Yung.

We’re supposed to be talking about her show, The Cleaning Lady, now in its fourth season, but before I even introduce myself, the actor inquires about the three prints hanging on the wall behind me. In this scenario, I don’t mind being put on the spot, and I tell her they’re artwork by a Cambodian American artist from the Seattle area, where I live. I’m not surprised, and thoroughly delighted, to see Yung perk up at my response. Because like me, she is also of Cambodian descent—on her father’s side.

We proceed to spend almost two minutes of my allotted 10-minute interview discussing our families’ histories and where they migrated following the Khmer Rouge. My parents ended up in Washington state, while Yung’s father and that side of her family ended up in France. During this time, I also admit to the French Cambodian actor that I was particularly excited to speak with her because of our shared heritage. After all, it’s not every day that I get to speak to the star of a hit network drama who I have this in common with.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Asian American representation in film and television was pretty sparse—and what little we did have was usually East Asian. As a young Cambodian American girl, I longed to see some Southeast Asian faces on the screen.

So you can imagine my excitement when I learned about The Cleaning Lady in 2022. The Fox drama—which is based on an Argentinian show (La chica que limpia)—follows Thony De La Rosa (Yung), a Cambodian doctor who comes to the United States for a life-saving treatment for her son, but quickly discovers that’s much easier said than done. As the system fails her, she overstays her visa and is forced into hiding as a now-undocumented immigrant, and in order to survive, she becomes a cleaning lady for the cartel.

The show is just as intense as it sounds. And the best part (at least in my opinion)? Yung’s character is actually Cambodian. In addition, Thony lives with her Filipino husband’s sister Fiona (Australian Filipino actor Martha Millan), and her family, in Las Vegas—so we’ve got even more Southeast Asian representation.

The Cleaning Lady is the first and longest-running primetime drama led by Southeast Asian women and the show just kicked off its fourth season on Tuesday. And in this upcoming season, viewers are in for a wild ride—as usual—as well as a treat from at least one special guest star (more on that later).

Reclaiming their lives

This season, both Thony and Fiona are taking control of their own fates.

“She’s tired of being used as a pawn—by the FBI, by the cartel. And I think we kind of started feeling it at the end of season three and then beginning of season four,” Yung says about Thony, who is is finally hanging up her cleaning uniform and scrubbing back in as a doctor at a small community hospital (as well as for the cartel, but at least this time it’s her choice). “It’s her trying to reclaim her life and her identity—her identity as a doctor.”

Yung adds that Thony’s reclamation will also show viewers another side of her. “In this season, the writers have kind of established a love triangle, and it’s a good opportunity to see who she is as a woman, because we’ve always explored how she is as a mother—you know, her part of the family, this dynamic with Fiona and the kids and her own kid,” she tells me. “This is the first time, more, that we’re exploring her womanhood. So, it is really a season to see Thony coming back to herself.”

And as for Fiona, Millan says her character is chasing her American dream as she works to keep her cleaning business afloat as a single mom. “She’s been through enough the last three seasons…and experienced many situations that most people haven’t,” she says. “At this point, it’s now about her, and about how she’s going to really achieve and pursue that American dream, and to watch her children thrive, also pursuing their dreams. I think that that’s the main focus for her this season.”

Balancing darkness with laughter

Millan’s not wrong when she says her character’s been through a lot.

Both Fiona and Thony, as well as Fiona’s son Chris (Sean Lew), are undocumented—representing a portion of American society we don’t always see in entertainment. In The Cleaning Lady, we see the struggles these characters experience in their everyday lives. And Millan says it’s important to also consider why people would go through such extremes and live in such an uncertain state. “Being undocumented is a real issue, and that is highlighted in the show,” she says. “Even though we are choosing unconventional ways in order to pursue the American dream, it just shows that it is part of this situation of the world. I mean, it’s not only in America. Everywhere, there are people just trying to find ways to give better opportunities for their families.”

And being undocumented is just one of the issues the De La Rosas deal with throughout the series. There’s also illness in the family, law enforcement and the cartel watching their every move, and more. For three seasons, it has just been one thing after another for the family. It’s enough to stress viewers out—as well as the actors.

Yung admits that it’s really hard to sustain the level of anxiety thrown at her. As an actor, she likes to ground her characters so she can relate to them. She also likes to call her characters people, so she will ask, “How do I relate to this? How can I meet this person?” “It’s a lot of struggle,” Yung says. “She’s going through pain, she’s going through struggle. She has to find solutions. It’s a lot of anxiety.” To balance all of that darkness, she uses laughter, and a lot of it—otherwise her system would implode.

Millan also likes to laugh a lot on set. “It’s not that I don’t take it seriously. As an actress, my process is just to be very relaxed and enjoy what I’m doing, and love what I’m doing in order to really access a lot of the darkness that the family has to go through,” she explains. “So it is just bringing a lot of joy to set for me personally, and sometimes I just have to dance in the corner by myself.”

An iconic guest star

Season four of The Cleaning Lady kicks off with a bang, and the surprises keep coming as episode two—which will air on Tuesday—will feature Filipino singer and actor, Lea Salonga as a guest star.

Lea Salonga guest stars in season four, episode two of “The Cleaning Lady.”

Fox

Salonga plays Rose, a former acquaintance of Fiona, who is now the head of a local Filipino American community center, and takes every chance she gets to boast about giving back to the community. To put it bluntly, her character (and her click-clacking heels) is, as Salonga says, “awful.” “There is that one person who’s the head of something, and you can’t always put your finger on it, but you know that you don’t like her,” she goes on to describe Rose. “But later on in the episode, we figure out why we don’t like her. It’s just that kind of, ‘I don’t like her’ that kind of crawls under your skin.”

Millan says working with Salonga was a humbling experience as the latter is a living legend and an icon. “But she is the warmest, (most) professional, talented, and at the same time, very precise actress that I’ve ever worked with, and it was slightly intimidating,” Millan says. “I definitely forgot some of my lines during that time, and my phone went off during a time when we actually were filming, and I had to profusely apologize for that. But nothing more to say, other than she’s just a wonderful spirit to work with and unexpectedly so, being the iconic legend that she is.”

When I ask Salonga if she will come back later in the season, she says she doesn’t know, but would love to because she had a really great time and enjoyed working with everybody on the set, calling episode director Timothy Busfield “a dream.” This leads me and Salonga to hypothesize what could happen to Rose if she were to return. “I don’t know how much more terrible she can be,” Salonga says. “Maybe she just gets killed in the most spectacular fashion. I don’t know. There’s organized crime in the show. We don’t know if she has any nefarious connections to any of these underworld elements. I honestly don’t know. I’m just pulling all of this out of the air. So, who knows? If they figure out what to do with her—even if it’s to bury her six feet under, sure I’ll come back for that.”