Toronto playwright and Jeopardy! contestant Nam Nguyen.Handout
It seems fitting that Toronto playwright Nam Nguyen learned he had qualified for Jeopardy! while conducting research.
Last winter, the 26-year-old writer, composer and trivia whiz was polishing the footnotes for his original musical, A Perfect Bowl of Pho, at the Toronto Reference Library when he received word he had passed the online test and was invited to audition.
Close to a year later, Nguyen got the call: He was going to be on Jeopardy!.
The up-and-coming playwright has been a mainstay in Toronto’s theatre scene since his smash 2022 Fringe musical about the Vietnamese diaspora and, yes, soup. Since then, he’s kept cooking up intriguing theatre projects, including Caezus, a hip-hop musical about the assassination of Julius Caesar, and Red Tide, about one of the worst environmental disasters in Vietnamese history. The University of Toronto grad is also a favourite trivia host at bars across the city, and helps supervise child actors at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
Now, after a two-episode Jeopardy! run that started on Monday night, he no longer needs to worry (much) about his student loans. Nguyen won close to US$27,000, which, after taxes, ends up being about the same in Canadian dollars. Nguyen says the money is going toward his debt, which will ease day-to-day financial stress.
It’s safe to say Jeopardy! was a habit that paid off.
“Jeopardy! was my pandemic activity,” Nguyen told The Globe and Mail. “I moved back in with my parents in 2020 and I still live with them now. I record the show if I’m out at night, which is very much the theatre lifestyle. I watch the show a lot with my girlfriend as well.”
Raised in Canada, Nguyen knew he needed to brush up on American politics and geography before his taping. “Brain Quest trivia cards were particularly useful for studying things that an elementary school American would know,” he said. “I also had a little practice buzzer to watch episodes of the show, and some people on Discord have fun boards to practice with.”
He found training for the game “quite easy.”
”My cultural upbringing ended up preparing pretty well for Jeopardy!,” Nguyen said. “I know a good mix of academic things and pop culture. My mom’s been watching Jeopardy! since my family first arrived in Ottawa in 1985. That’s almost as old as the current revival of Jeopardy! itself.”
Mastering the show’s very particular rules was also a breeze.
“You have to answer in the form of a question, otherwise you’ll lose money. But I find it to be a pretty intuitive way of doing it. I’m not declaring an answer; I’m asking, and hoping Ken Jennings will tell me if I’m correct.”
The two-day Jeopardy! run was a wild ride, he says, and now that it’s done there is no bad blood between him and his competitors, with whom he shares a group chat. The Jeopardy! community is a close-knit one, he’s discovered. Fellow Canadian champion Mattea Roach even made an appearance at the viewing party for his first episode. (Another fun insider fact: Contestants stand on small boxes to even out any height discrepancies. On his winning episode, Nguyen stood on the tallest box.)
There’s always a chance he could return in a future episode as a former champion. But if he ever goes back to the Jeopardy! set, the artist will find a different way to get around.
“Jeopardy! is great, but Los Angeles is a terrible place,” Nguyen said, laughing. “I’ve never seen class so visible in my life. I rode public transit a lot, because I’m someone who rides transit, but you can’t really do that in L.A. There’s a sprawling bus network, and a very bad subway system, but it takes entirely too long to get anywhere. It took me about two hours to get from Koreatown to LAX.”