![]() ![]() 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. Then he got a job as a graphic designer at a Los Angeles alternative weekly. 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. One day we’ll look back and see all these people who came from that theatre company.” “I remember, during that, hoping that this was gonna be like a Steppenwolf type of thing. “We were so cocky, because we were so popular,” Park said. The opening night drew a sellout crowd of hundreds of people. His parents still live in the modest house in the Castle Heights neighborhood where he and his brother were brought up. For thirty years, his mother worked in the accounting office at the U.C.L.A. His father worked at a stuffed-toy company before opening a one-hour-photo studio in Santa Monica. ![]() Park has spent his entire life in Los Angeles, the second son of Korean immigrants. In high school, Park and his group of friends, which he describes as racially mixed, like a “perfect Benetton ad,” spent their free time filming their own skits, in the style of “In Living Color.” “I wasn’t cool, but I was cool with everyone,” he told me. We pulled up in front of Hamilton High School, his alma mater, and he recalled the Los Angeles riots in 1992, when students were told to go home early, and he wandered the streets all day with a friend. He proudly showed off one of his rare indulgences: a new receiver he had installed so that he could play music from his phone. A faded photo of his daughter was tucked into his visor. Last fall, Park and I were driving through West Los Angeles in a weathered Toyota RAV4. I think that there will be people who are uncomfortable with it.” ![]() I anticipate when it comes into the real world it’ll be-I don’t know if ‘divisive’ is the word. It’s like they kind of know you for one thing, so that’s all the offers you’re getting,” he told me. It’s an unlikely passion project for someone known for playing amiable roles. “Shortcomings” is a movie full of, in Park’s word, “shitty” characters, and he has dreamed of making it for more than fifteen years. The film is set in the present, giving its central questions about race, self-loathing, and voyeurism a fresh backdrop: cancel culture, Instagram stalking, the question of whether “Crazy Rich Asians”-style blockbusters are actually good for the Asian American community-if you believe that such a thing exists. Park was in New York, with Ho, to film his directorial début, “Shortcomings,” an adaptation of Adrian Tomine’s 2007 graphic novel about a group of young, somewhat unlikable Asian Americans negotiating relationships, late-twenties ambition, and their baser instincts. “He’s always been a really ambitious guy,” the comedian Ali Wong, his longtime friend and “Always Be My Maybe” co-star, told me. In 2019, Park started Imminent Collision, a production company, with Michael Golamco and Hieu Ho, two friends he met through a theatre troupe he started in college. Because if I was on my own I would never do that.” I’m so glad something’s forcing me to be social and to meet these people and talk to these people. And, while I’m social, I’m, like, This is so fun. “I don’t consider myself a social person,” Park told me. Onscreen, as well as in person, he is deferential and gracious, quick to fill in conversation with agreement and encouragement, happy to shift the focus away from himself. ![]() Park is the kind of actor who succeeds by reacting to other people’s drama rather than being at the center of his own. We met near Manhattan’s Chinatown and, as he approached, I noticed his colorful cycling hat before I noticed him. “One of the great advantages of being Asian, and borderline well known, is that people tend to think you look like just another Asian,” he told me. His onscreen presence makes him seem approachable, if people notice him at all. For six seasons, Park played Louis Huang, the series’ wholesome, occasionally overwhelmed father. The series débuted in 2015 and was the first network show in nearly two decades to feature a predominantly Asian cast. His career has been defined by a kind of chummy adaptability, whether he plays a dictator (he made Kim Jong Un seem like a fun hang in “The Interview,” from 2014) or raps, as he did as a slacker in the 2019 romantic comedy “Always Be My Maybe,” or adopts an immigrant’s accent, as in his breakthrough role, on the ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat,” adapted from the chef Eddie Huang’s memoir. ![]()
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