Before Stephanie Hsu was an Oscar nominee, she was a computer.
Specifically, she was Karen the Computer in the Broadway production of SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical — a sentient evil supercomputer voiced by an actor who had spent years building a career in experimental downtown theater that most of America had never heard of. Then came Be More Chill, then Everything Everywhere All at Once, then an Academy Award nomination, then a Tony nomination for The Rocky Horror Show.
The through-line is not luck. It is range.
Stephanie Hsu (pronounced SHOO) is a 35-year-old Chinese-American actress and singer born on November 25, 1990, in Torrance, California, near Los Angeles. She is best known for her dual role as Joy Wang and Jobu Tupaki in the A24 film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2026, she is nominated for the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical for playing Janet Weiss in the Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show at Studio 54 — becoming the first Janet in the show’s more than 50-year stage history to receive a Tony nomination in that category.
She had never seen Rocky Horror before she got the call.
Growing Up in Torrance: A Single Mother, a Grandmother’s Story, and an Actress Who Knew Early
Hsu grew up in Torrance, California, a city in the South Bay region of Los Angeles County, raised primarily by her single mother. Her family story travels across continents and conflict. Her maternal grandmother fled mainland China to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War. Her mother, as a teenager, immigrated from Taiwan to the United States for education and a better future. She raised Stephanie largely on her own.
The details of Hsu’s father are not public. She has spoken about her family background in interviews, particularly the immigrant experience that shaped her mother and grandmother, but has kept the specifics of her immediate family private. What she has shared is the impact: growing up as a Chinese-American girl in Southern California in the 1990s and early 2000s, she did not see herself reflected in the roles that were available, the stories being told, or the faces of the actors telling them.
She attended Palos Verdes Peninsula High School, graduated, and left California for Brooklyn to pursue theater before enrolling at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied at both the Atlantic Theater Company and the Experimental Theater Wing, graduating with a BFA. She also trained at the International Theatre Workshop in Amsterdam.
“I remember being really young when I told my mom I wanted to be an actress,” she told the Los Angeles Times. The declaration came early. Getting there took longer.
Downtown Theater, Brooklyn, and the Long Pre-Fame Chapter
After NYU, Hsu spent years working in experimental and downtown theater in New York City — the kind of work that builds craft without building name recognition. She performed in productions at IRT Theater and The Gym at Judson, took on roles in small shows that critics who mattered noticed even when audiences remained small.
The break into mainstream theater visibility came in two stages.
First, Karen the Computer in SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical (2017). The role is exactly what it sounds like: an anthropomorphic evil supercomputer who is a recurring villain in the SpongeBob universe. Hsu had actually been involved with the production’s development since 2012, when she participated in the first table reading for the role. She played Karen in Chicago in 2016, then on Broadway in 2017. It was her Broadway debut, and it required the kind of committed physical and vocal performance that made people in the industry pay attention even if the general public filed it under “that SpongeBob show.”
Then came Christine Canigula in Be More Chill (2019). The show, based on Ned Vizzini’s novel, follows a teenager who takes a supercomputer pill to become popular. Hsu played Christine, the lead’s love interest — and she did it while simultaneously filming The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on her days off. The production transferred from regional theater to Off-Broadway to Broadway, and Hsu transferred with it. Her boyfriend, Britton Smith, played Jake Dillinger in the same production; they had met through the show and made their relationship public in 2019.
Be More Chill was significant for reasons beyond its run. It was one of the first times Hsu was in a romantic lead role on a Broadway stage, and she has spoken frankly about the weight of that: she had grown up without seeing Asian-American women in those roles, and she was conscious of what it meant to occupy one.
“Art is a version of subliminal messaging,” she said afterward. “There are going to be so many people, and young people especially, who are going to consume this and start to imagine a world in which the person that they have a crush on is me.”
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Getting to the Daniels
Television added another dimension. Hsu joined The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in Season 3 as Mei Lin, a recurring role that put her in front of the Amazon Prime audience and continued building her screen credibility alongside her theater work.
But the connection that changed her career was not through television. It was through the experimental theater world she had inhabited for years. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as “the Daniels”) found Hsu through that network — the downtown theater scene that prizes craft over commercial viability. They cast her in a film about a Chinese-American immigrant woman who discovers she can access the lives of alternate universe versions of herself, and who is threatened by her own daughter, Joy, who has become an omniversal villain called Jobu Tupaki.
Hsu played both Joy and Jobu Tupaki.
Everything Everywhere All at Once: The Dual Role That Defined a Moment
Everything Everywhere All at Once premiered at SXSW on March 11, 2022. It reached wide release on March 25. By the time awards season arrived, it had become the most decorated film of the year and one of the most culturally significant films of the decade.
The film won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture. Michelle Yeoh won Best Actress. Ke Huy Quan won Best Supporting Actor. The film won Best Original Screenplay and Best Director. And Hsu received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress — losing to Jamie Lee Curtis, her co-star, in a category where any other year she might well have won.
What she did in that film is genuinely difficult to describe without resorting to superlatives. Joy Wang, in her “normal” state, is an adult daughter navigating a tense, loving, complicated relationship with her immigrant mother while also being queer in a family that has not fully processed that. Jobu Tupaki, her alternate-universe self, is a being who has experienced every possible version of existence simultaneously and responded by choosing nihilism as her philosophy. The film requires both versions to coexist in the same performance, and Hsu does it with a physicality and emotional precision that made critics run out of vocabulary.
She also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Breakthrough Performance, and received wins or nominations from 38 film critics’ organizations for the role.
The film’s themes landed with particular force for Chinese-American audiences. The mother-daughter relationship at its center — the gap between immigrant parents and their American children, the difficulty of expressing love across cultural and generational distance — resonated beyond what any awards tally could measure. Hsu has spoken about Everything Everywhere as an act of “intergenerational healing” for viewers who saw their own families in it.
She also performed the nominated song “This Is a Life” at the Academy Awards itself, stepping in for Mitski alongside Son Lux and David Byrne.
| Award | Category | Film | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Academy Award | Best Supporting Actress | EEAAO | Nominated |
| Independent Spirit Award | Best Breakthrough Performance | EEAAO | Won |
| Critics’ org nominations/wins | Supporting performance | EEAAO | 38 organizations |
After the Oscar: Joy Ride, Laid, and the Screen Chapter
The Oscar nomination opened doors. What Hsu did with them was, characteristically, not the most predictable path.
Joy Ride (2023) was a raunchy road-trip comedy about a group of Asian-American women traveling across China — a film that leaned hard into adult humor and provided a sharp counterpoint to the more dramatic weight of Everything Everywhere. It confirmed that her comedic instincts and willingness to commit fully to physical comedy were not specific to one director’s vision.
She appeared in animated productions including Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight (2022) and voiced Vontra in The Wild Robot (2024), which became one of the year’s most praised animated films. She guest-starred on Poker Face and Blue Eye Samurai.
Her biggest screen role post-Oscar came with Laid (2024), a dark romantic comedy on Peacock in which she played Ruby Yao, a self-destructive romantic whose former partners die in increasingly strange ways. She was also an executive producer on the series. It was the first time she held both acting and producing credits on a major television project, and it pushed her toward the kind of creative control she had been building toward.
“Coming back to the theater feels a little bit like I picked up where I left off before COVID,” she told WWD in 2026. “Which was being a total masochist artist.”
Rocky Horror: The First Janet Ever Tony-Nominated
When director Sam Pinkleton called Hsu to play Janet Weiss in a new Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show, she had a confession.
“I was like, ‘I’ve actually never seen Rocky Horror,'” she has said. “So I watched the movie that night, and fell in love with it, and have been deep diving into the fandom ever since.”
The Rocky Horror Show opened at Studio 54 on April 23, 2026, directed by Pinkleton (who had previously directed the Tony-winning Oh, Mary!). Luke Evans plays Frank-N-Furter. Rachel Dratch plays the Narrator. Juliette Lewis plays Magenta. Michaela Jaé Rodriguez plays Columbia. It is a cast of actors who do not approach the production as a nostalgia exercise.
Pinkleton envisioned Hsu’s Janet not as the classic innocent ingénue who gets corrupted by Frank-N-Furter, but as “an awakened sapphic creature” and “Frank 2.0” — a character who undergoes a transformation and emerges something entirely new. For Hsu, who identifies as queer, the reframing was not just dramatically interesting. It was personal.
“I never saw myself as an ingénue,” she told WWD. “I never saw myself as the girl next door. I could never imagine myself as Janet until Sam called me. And it’s very much not lost on me that my existence at this moment in the history of this production — my Janet is a cultural pivot point for my community. I feel really honored to be a part of that shift in perceiving what a Janet could even look like.”
She is the first person to be Tony-nominated for playing Janet in the show’s more than 50 years of continuous worldwide production.
Before opening night, Hsu met Susan Sarandon, who played Janet in the 1975 film and is the most famous holder of the role. The meeting happened by chance at a play in New York. Hsu approached her, started to introduce herself, and Sarandon cut her off: “You’re about to be me.” The moment became one of the most-quoted anecdotes of the 2026 theater season. Hsu has described it as receiving a “soft, little blessing.”
“My Janet would not exist without hers,” Hsu has said. “And so it’s been really incredible to get to study Susan Sarandon and then have her blessing to create something new.”
The production received nine Tony nominations. Rocky Horror was extended, with performances now running through November 29, 2026 at Studio 54.
Britton Smith: The Relationship That Started at a Stage Door
The most-searched question about Hsu after her age is who she is dating. The answer is Britton Smith, and their story starts at Be More Chill.
Smith played Jake Dillinger in the same production where Hsu played Christine. They met through the show and kept their relationship private for several years before Hsu publicly confirmed it in early 2019 with an Instagram post. He is a musician — the lead singer and frontrunner of Britton and The Sting, a band that plays funk, gospel, soul, and what Smith describes as testimony. Their shows have been described by attendees as church-like in their energy. He is also a lecturer at Columbia Law School.
Smith’s music has been featured in Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New Yorker, and was selected by NPR for their Tiny Desk Submission list in 2020. He is vocal about his work as a musician and activist, centering themes of Blackness, authenticity, and community in his art.
Hsu and Smith have maintained a largely private relationship despite both having public profiles. They are not married. They have no children. Hsu has spoken generally about her personal life in interviews but does not detail it.
Hsu identifies as queer, which she has addressed publicly in the context of her work — particularly in discussing the mother-daughter relationship in Everything Everywhere and her approach to Janet in Rocky Horror. She has been measured and intentional about how she discusses identity, neither avoiding it nor making it the primary frame through which she engages with the press.
What She Represents, and Why It Matters
The editorial observation that most bio pages miss about Stephanie Hsu is this: she is not a story about overnight success. She is a story about a decade of serious craft work that preceded any public recognition, followed by a sudden acceleration that the industry often mistakes for a debut.
She trained experimentally. She worked downtown. She played a computer on Broadway. She played a love interest in a teen musical. She did all of this while being, by her own account, someone who grew up never seeing herself in the roles she wanted.
Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri — her peers in the post-pandemic generation of actresses reshaping what mainstream entertainment looks like — both followed similar trajectories: years of genuine craft work, a breakout moment in a specific film or show, then rapid acceleration. What distinguishes Hsu is the degree to which her breakout was also, for a significant portion of her audience, an act of recognition. Asian-American viewers who saw Everything Everywhere did not just enjoy the film. Many of them saw their family in it.
Her role model statement during API Heritage Month is worth noting directly. On the TODAY show, she cited Lucy Liu, Sandra Oh, and playwright David Henry Hwang as the figures she looked to growing up. All three of them spent years being told, in various ways, that there was no space for them in the stories American entertainment was choosing to tell. All three of them made space anyway.
Caissie Levy and the 2026 Tony season put Hsu in company with theatrical heavyweights who have spent decades building exactly the kind of resume she is now accumulating. She is 35. She has been doing this seriously since her early twenties. What comes next is not a mystery — it is a continuation.
Net Worth and Career Earnings
Hsu’s estimated net worth is approximately $2 to $4 million as of 2026, reflecting her film work post-Everything Everywhere, her television roles, Broadway earnings, and her growing profile as an executive producer. The range is wide because her income has been in rapid transition since 2022, and pre-Everything Everywhere earnings from Broadway and television were not publicly disclosed at a level that allows for precise calculation.
Her income streams include Broadway salary from Rocky Horror (a Roundabout Theatre Company production at Studio 54, with a cast of significant names), residuals and royalties from Everything Everywhere All at Once and its cast recording, her salary from Laid including her executive producer fee, voice acting work across multiple animated properties, and the increased brand attention that comes with both an Oscar nomination and a Tony nomination on an active résumé.
She is not at the income level of a long-established film star, but she is at the point where every new project commands significantly more than the last. The Rocky Horror extension through November 2026 extends her Broadway earnings accordingly.
Frequently Asked Questions
How old is Stephanie Hsu?
Stephanie Hsu is 35 years old. She was born on November 25, 1990, in Torrance, California.
What is Stephanie Hsu’s ethnicity?
Hsu is Chinese-American with Taiwanese heritage. Her maternal grandmother fled mainland China to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War. Her mother immigrated from Taiwan to the United States as a teenager. Hsu was born and raised in the Los Angeles area.
Who is Stephanie Hsu’s boyfriend?
Stephanie Hsu has been in a relationship with Britton Smith since approximately 2018. They met while both were performing in Be More Chill, where Hsu played Christine Canigula and Smith played Jake Dillinger. Smith is a musician and the lead singer of Britton and The Sting, as well as a lecturer at Columbia Law School. They are not married and have no children.
What is Stephanie Hsu known for?
Hsu is best known for her dual role as Joy Wang and Jobu Tupaki in the A24 film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She is also known for Broadway’s Be More Chill, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical, and the 2026 Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show, for which she received a Tony nomination for Best Leading Actress.
Is Stephanie Hsu in Rocky Horror on Broadway?
Yes. Hsu is playing Janet Weiss in Sam Pinkleton’s Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show at Studio 54. The production opened April 23, 2026 and has been extended through November 29, 2026. She received a Tony nomination for the role — the first actor playing Janet in the show’s 50-plus-year history to be nominated.
What is Stephanie Hsu’s net worth?
Stephanie Hsu’s estimated net worth is approximately $2 to $4 million as of 2026, built from her Broadway career, her film work including Everything Everywhere All at Once and Joy Ride, her television roles in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Laid (including an executive producer credit), and her voice acting projects.
Quick Facts
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Stephanie Ann Hsu |
| Pronunciation | SHOO |
| Date of Birth | November 25, 1990 |
| Age (2026) | 35 |
| Birthplace | Torrance, California |
| Ethnicity | Chinese-American (Taiwanese heritage) |
| Education | Palos Verdes Peninsula High School; NYU Tisch BFA |
| Broadway Debut | SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical (2017) |
| Best Known For | Joy/Jobu Tupaki in Everything Everywhere All at Once |
| Oscar Nomination | Best Supporting Actress (2023) |
| Tony Nomination | Best Leading Actress in a Musical (2026, Rocky Horror Show) |
| Current Show | Rocky Horror Show, Studio 54 (through Nov 29, 2026) |
| Boyfriend | Britton Smith (musician, Columbia Law lecturer) |
| Net Worth | Est. $2M-$4M |