It's time for Zoë Chao, rom-com sidekick, to take the lead

February is a rough month. In many places, it's cold and gray. The holidays are few and far between and not the most thrilling of occasions (yay, Presidents' Day). This Valentine's Day season, the pickings were grim if you were in the mood for a 2023 romantic comedy. You had few new streaming films, including the Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher vehicle "Your Place or Mine" on Netflix and Prime Video's "Somebody I Used to Know," starring Alison Brie. 

Neither film was perhaps the freshest of offerings, but one player connected the two like a life raft to brighter and better things: Zoë Chao. The actor and writer had small roles in both films, bringing energy and light to the projects, and delivering with grace some of the best, and often only, lines with humor.

Where to look for bright spots this winter? Look to the background, where Chao is acting her heart out, deserving much more than to be the supporting, zany best friend.

In "Your Place or Mine," Chao plays Minka, the glamorous if shallow ex-girlfriend of Peter (Kutcher), the wealthy man-child who is the longtime best friend of Witherspoon's Debbie (for some reason, her character is named Debbie). When Debbie and Peter swap houses, Minka accidentally drops in on Debbie hoping for a reconnection with Peter. Finding Debbie there instead, she slips into instant new best friend mode. On top of that, she's going to find love for Debbie. Minka is an unflappable woman who loves a mission.

Chao's role could have been "Sex and the City"-lite (as "Your Place or Mine" has sad shades of the much better "The Holiday") but she infuses Minka with heart. It's not easy to deliver lines like, "I dig this whole sexy, Gen-X, Earth Mama thing you've got going on." But Chao takes the unremarkable dialogue and the unreasonable quirkiness of Minka and makes her character concerned and diligent, her face radiating with love for this friend she literally just met. Chao also makes her character's endless parade of loud outfits look both effortless and planned, from a tiny dress with nothing beneath it, as she loudly tells Debbie, to a "Blossom"-era bucket hat. Give this actor a starring role. She can make a bucket hat work. 

In "Somebody I Used to Know," her role is even smaller, a cameo near the beginning. Chao plays Ramona, a network executive sent to deliver bad news to Brie's Ally, a TV producer on a food-themed reality show. Mouth full of breakfast ice cream sandwich, Chao delivers a graduate class in passive aggressiveness. Who knew clapping could be so violent?  

In recent years, Chao has had both larger roles in small projects and supportive parts in higher profile ones., including co-starring as Anna Kendrick's best friend in HBO Max's 'Love Life" and appearing as an art teacher in Apple TV+'s "The Afterparty," a role for which she drew upon her upbringing as the child of two artists and her time interning at the Getty. And we'll get to see her again in the ensemble in the much-anticipated return of Starz's "Party Down."

She did get her chance to play the lead in "Strangers," the Facebook Watch series about a woman who rents out her spare bedroom and discovers her own sexuality along the way. W writes, though Chao has "made a name for herself inhabiting a lot of the supporting 'best friend' roles . . . it's been clear that she has what it takes to be the star."

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But "Strangers" only ran for one season. The Los Angeles Times said of her 2021 film "Long Weekend," where Chao got to be the love interest: "Zoe Chao reduced to manic pixie dust," despite a performance The Guardian called "engaging and believable."

Like some other excellent supporting performers, Chao is better than much of her material. She can deliver clichés but she deserves more than them, and the world deserves to see an actor like her get the guy, girl or person —  and get to be in a project worthy of her caliber. As she told W, "I just love genre, I love style, I love period pieces — anything where having a face like mine could be in spaces where faces like mine haven't been before."