Barcelona | Sandra Oh | The Night Listener | Cristina Yang

Oh, Barcelona!

by Mark Seal

Oh Barcelona!

Taking a break from her busy career, The Night Listener's Sandra Oh went to Spain and "learned to do nothing."



"I was introduced to Barcelona by an old, dear ­theater-school friend, Andrew Tarbet, who lives there with his girlfriend," says Sandra Oh, who came to Barcelona on a rare break from her increasingly hectic career. "I found myself with a few weeks to spare last year - and have always had an open invitation - so I decided to take the trip. It was the place where I learned to sleep. Learned to do nothing, to commune with the sun and the sand and to enjoy watching the people go by." She was on hiatus from her Golden Globe-winning role as Dr. Cristina Yang on the hit ABC series Grey's Anatomy and still reeling from the acclaim of her star turn in the on-the-road wine movie Sideways. She was going to spend her off-season working on an independent film in Korea. "But the funding fell through, so I had nothing planned," she says. She looked down at the blanks in her calendar and thought, Barcelona!

Born and raised in Ottawa, Oh was already in ballet lessons at age four and in her first play at age 10. She beat out more than 1,000 hopefuls for a Canadian Broadcasting Company television film, and since then, her vacations have been increasingly rare. This month, she stars with Robin Williams, Rory Culkin, and Toni Collette in the psychological thriller The Night Listener, based on the best-selling­ book by San Francisco writer Armistead Maupin. She also returned to the stage in the dramatic play Satellites, which just completed its run last month at the Public Theater in New York City. But in a moment of rare repose, here's Sandra Oh in Barcelona … before she went back to work.

What's the first thing you did in Barcelona?




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ISSUE: Aug 1, 2006
American Way Cover - 8/1/2006