The opening night drew a sellout crowd of hundreds of people. “We were so cocky, because we were so popular,” Park said. “I remember, during that, hoping that this was gonna be like a Steppenwolf type of thing. One day we’ll look back and see all these people who came from that theatre company.”
Park stayed at U.C.L.A., where he started a master’s degree in Asian American studies, researching depictions of Korean merchants in African American film. Then he got a job as a graphic designer at a Los Angeles alternative weekly. He directed shows in the back yard of his parents’ house, where he was living; he taught himself stage makeup and amassed a collection of wigs and costumes. He did standup comedy and rapped in a band modelled after the Roots.
Around 2002, Park quit his full-time job and began to audition, mostly for commercials but occasionally for sitcoms. He booked just enough roles to feel O.K. about his long-term prospects, but not enough that he could leave home permanently. Even when he got his first steady gig, in 2006, as a cast member on the MTV improv-and-skit show “Wild ’N Out,” he didn’t give up his shifts at Starbucks. At U.C.L.A., his mother worked alongside young people who wanted to break into Hollywood. “They would show up to work with their head shots and reels and they’d show my mom,” Park said. “I know in her head it was, like, If they can’t make it, how on earth are you gonna make it?”
Park was in his late twenties when he started auditioning, and as he entered his thirties he regarded the small, competitive cohort of Asian American actors and wondered whether he fit in. He watched from afar as the director Justin Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow” premièred at Sundance, in 2002, becoming the first Asian American film ever to be acquired at the festival. By 2004, such actors as Daniel Dae Kim, a regular on the ABC series “Lost,” and John Cho, a star in the “Harold and Kumar” films, had broken through. Park was both heartened by their success and disheartened that opportunity seemed to be passing him by.
Around that time, Park auditioned for a guest spot on “Help Me Help You,” a short-lived sitcom starring Ted Danson as a therapist. His agent told him that the part was down to him and a friend from the Asian American theatre community. He spent the weekend waiting by the phone. His friend, he said, “wasn’t only a great actor, he was also super comfortable around people. And I was comfortable around my people, but I wasn’t comfortable around the world outside, you know? It always was a marvel to me when I’d see somebody who knew how to, like, be a human.”
Cartoon by Amy Hwang
Park told me this story a couple of times, always with a mix of seriousness and self-effacing humor. “My entire future rested on this one-day guest-star role,” he said. He realized that this seemed like a minor indignity in an actor’s career. “I just needed some confirmation that I was doing the right thing with my life.” When his agent gave him the bad news, Park began crying. “It was the lowest I had ever felt,” he said.
He contemplated quitting and going for a master’s in architecture, but he hadn’t taken the prerequisite courses. So he kept auditioning. He recalls writing in his journal that his only goal was to book enough commercial work to be able to move out of his parents’ house, so that he could have his own back yard in which to stage plays.
Around this time, Park wandered into Giant Robot, a store specializing in Asian and Asian American pop culture. He gravitated toward the cover of “Shortcomings,” Tomine’s graphic novel: he had never seen Asian characters drawn in such a realistic, cliché-free style. And he had never read anything about young Asian Americans, like him, bumming around, hanging out in cafés, struggling with change, ambition, insecurity, and their own ugliness. He read the entire book in the store and then bought it so that he could read it again at home.
He saw himself in all the characters: some were politically righteous and romantic, others apathetic, judgmental, and cruel. In his experience, Asian American actors rarely got the chance to explore such a full range of emotions; they were often cast according to stereotype, as doctors or scientists, never as everyday antiheroes just trying to figure life out. He was struck: “Oh, my God, there were stories like this out in the world.”
Park dreamed of playing a character as complex as Tomine’s protagonist, a snobby, possibly self-loathing Japanese American film buff named Ben. But, as he slowly began booking gigs and piecing together a career, he aged out of the role.
In 2009, he married Jae Suh Park, an actress he had met at a theatre fund-raiser, and in 2012 they had a daughter, Ruby. The family starred in a 2013 Web comedy series that Park created, called “Baby Mentalist,” about a crime-fighting baby.
There are times when it’s hard to tell whether Park is smiling or grimacing, particularly when he reflects on the first decade of his career, which he recalls as an “extended low.” Making those low-budget Web series with friends, like “Baby Mentalist” and “Ikea Heights,” a soap-opera spoof that was surreptitiously filmed in an Ikea in Burbank, gave Park a creative outlet. But he was constantly fearful that work would dry up at any moment. In traffic just outside Hollywood, I asked how different his life might be if success had come earlier.
“I wouldn’t be as appreciative of things,” he said. He chuckled. “I definitely wouldn’t be driving a RAV4.”
He told me about a pilot he once shot, in which he played a police officer. As Park delivered his first line, the director cut him short. He told Park to be stronger. “I was just so eager to please,” Park said. “I was, like, Absolutely. I didn’t fully know what he meant, I was just, like, Yes, yes.” He tried another reading, but the director stopped him again: “Can you just play it more manly?” This happened several more times, until the director finally yelled at Park to “be more of a man!”
Randall Park Breaks Out of Character
Source: Super Trending News PH
Post a Comment
0 Comments