LOS ANGELES, CA.- It’s tough to see the resemblance.
In the Broadway production of David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face,” starting previews at the Todd Haimes Theater on Sept. 13, Daniel Dae Kim will star as DHH, a fictionalized, none-too-sympathetic character based very loosely on the Tony-winning playwright.
“Who wouldn’t want to have their doppelgänger be Daniel Dae Kim?,” said Hwang, whose play premiered off-Broadway in 2007 and who helped cast Kim in this Roundabout Theater Company revival.
Who indeed? Since Kim first broke through in 2004 as the brooding, morally conflicted former enforcer on the hit ABC series “Lost,” and later as a tough, shotgun-blasting detective on the CBS reboot of “Hawaii Five-0,” he has become known for a certain type of character. Earnest. Serious. Enigmatic. Dignified.
As the King of Siam, “Daniel stood in the middle of this enormous space and just held the entire audience in the palm of his hands,” said Maria Friedman, who performed alongside him in a 2009 staging of “The King and I” at London’s cavernous Royal Albert Hall. “There’s nothing slight about him.”
Kim revisited the role in 2016, making his Broadway debut in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “The King and I,” where he was praised by Ben Brantley, a former chief critic of The New York Times, for his “astute comic timing” and his character’s “restive, self-delighted intelligence.”
“Yellow Face” marks Kim’s return to Broadway after nearly a decade. It’s also one of his rare forays into satire. “I’ve always loved comedy,” Kim said. “But I am aware that people have not usually seen me in this way.”
The main action of the semi-autobiographical drama begins in 1990, as a character known as DHH roils New York’s theatrical community by protesting the casting of Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian pimp in “Miss Saigon.” This part of the story is true, and Hwang was taken to task for his then-controversial stance. In the world of the play, however, as written by Hwang himself, DHH is no activist hero. In the end, he comes off as something of a coward and a hypocrite.
“He’s trying to do all the right things,” Kim said, “but parts of his personality get in the way of making the right decisions.”
The play’s director, Leigh Silverman, added: “DHH is really the butt of a lot of the jokes.”
In a delicious twist, Kim is lampooning an Asian American artist who has long been one of the most outspoken activists and advocates for his community — a role that Kim himself is embracing in real life three decades on. For years, between and during acting gigs, Kim has worked on issues from anti-Asian hate and bullying to the lack of Asian representation in the arts.
One morning last month, Kim walked from his Koreatown apartment, where he lives when he’s not on location or at his home in Hawaii, to a nearby cafe. His sculpted features, which have landed him on more “hot Asian actors” and “sexiest men alive” listicles than he would care to discuss, were on full display. He talked about his life and career, the challenges of being an Asian American actor, and how his starring role in “Yellow Face” came to be.
Kim, 56, was born in Busan, South Korea, and his family moved to the United States when he was 1. At Haverford College in Pennsylvania, he majored in political science and theater, thinking he would become a lawyer. “My dad is a doctor, and there was an emphasis in my family to go into something professional,” he said.
But Kim’s love of the theater would not be denied. During his junior year, he studied at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, where he performed the opening monologue from Hwang’s 1980 Obie-winning play, “FOB,” about the conflict between an American-born man of Chinese descent and a newly arrived Chinese immigrant.
“The feedback from the teacher was very kind, but in a way that was trying to mask that I wasn’t very good,” Kim said. “But that just made me want to work harder at this, because I loved it.”
After graduation, Kim did more theater, including a stint as Torvald Helmer, the suffocating patriarch in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” at New York’s Pan Asian Repertory Theater. “I was 22, playing Torvald,” Kim said. “I was too young, but it was a valuable opportunity for me, because where else would I ever get to play that role, especially at that time?”
Small parts on TV series such as “All My Children” and “Law & Order” (“a New York actor’s rite of passage”) followed. “I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be,” he said, so he enrolled in the graduate acting program at NYU.
Although Kim’s time there instilled in him greater confidence, he continued to contend with what it meant to be an actor of color. “There was a stage in our industry where they had one role that was designated for a minority, and that minority could be African American or Latino or Asian American,” he said. “They had to put in one of them, just for token diversity, so you were auditioning with people of all races for that one role.”
“And every television series would do their one Chinatown episode,” he continued, “so we would all let each other know when they were casting for it. If it wasn’t going to be me getting the role, it was going to be my friend. We all wanted that for each other.”
In 2004, Kim was lifted from one-shot bit parts to a starring role in “Lost,” which became one of the most popular shows in the world. It was at the height of its fame by the time he did “The King and I,” Friedman, his co-star in the production, recalled. “People were just losing it, screaming and shouting. They couldn’t quite make sense of seeing the guy from their telly on the streets of London.”
When “Lost” ended in 2010, Kim went right into “Hawaii Five-0,” shooting his death scene on the Oahu-based “Lost” at the same time he was shooting the pilot for “Hawaii Five-0.” “My boys were growing up in Hawaii, and they loved it,” he said. “My wife and I didn’t want to move them back to New York or LA, after they had grown up in a very different lifestyle.”
After seven seasons, Kim and Grace Park, another Korean American actor on the show, left “Hawaii Five-0” in 2017 when CBS refused to pay them the same salary as their white co-stars. The dispute sparked criticism of CBS, heightened by the show’s setting in Hawaii, where Asians outnumber whites 2 to 1. “The most rewarding compliment I received about that time was when people of color came up to me and said, I was in a situation and I was not valued at my workplace, and once I heard about what you did, I spoke up for myself,” Kim said.
“Yellow Face” came to Kim in 2022, when Hwang and Silverman, longtime collaborators, reunited to record an Audible production of the play. Hwang had seen Kim in a 2000 production of his play “Golden Child” at East West Players in Los Angeles, and the two had remained friends. After the first table reads for the recording, talk soon turned to a Broadway run.
“It felt funnier than it did in 2007, and fresher,” Hwang said. “The core issues at the center of the play, representation in casting, what it means to be an actor of color, what it means to get canceled, are so much more at the center of mainstream discourse than they were back then.”
In the play, after DHH champions the fight against Pryce’s yellowface casting, he mistakenly casts a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play, “Face Value,” then scrambles to cover it up. Hilarity and moral lapses ensue.
Despite Kim’s serene vibe, he is “an enormously funny guy,” Silverman said. “I’m looking forward to seeing this sweaty, panicked person inside the body of the cool, effervescent Daniel Dae Kim.”
Although DHH suffers a shameful fall from grace as a voice for Asian Americans, no such drop has come for Kim. In 2021, he testified before Congress to denounce anti-Asian violence and to condemn the 164 Republican members of the House who voted against the anti-hate bill HR 908. (It passed anyway.) He also led the creation in 2023 of Sunrise House, the official meeting place for Asian American and Pacific Islander artists and filmmakers attending and screening their films at Sundance. “There were houses for the African American community, the Native American community, the Latino community, but Asian Americans never had one,” Kim said.
Erika Moritsugu, President Joe Biden’s senior liaison to the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, praised Kim’s efforts to speak out against the rash of anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. “He also led some of the most difficult and important work to make sure that the recovery of Lahaina after the Maui wildfires was comprehensive, careful, and reverent of the Native Hawaiian people and the local community,” she said in an email.
Kim has also been active in campaigns to fight racism, championing a national Asian American and Pacific Islander day against bullying and hate. “I grew up in a steel town in Pennsylvania, so I remember what it was like to be bullied,” he said.
“I’ve seen Daniel spend thousands of hours in the trenches,” said Bing Chen, CEO of Gold House, an international nonprofit that pushes for greater Asian representation in the arts and the corporate world.
“We all call him President Kim,” Chen continued. “And we’re really not kidding.”
On this day in August, Kim had just returned from South Korea, where he had spent the previous six months filming “Butterfly,” an adaptation of a graphic novel of the same name. The series, which will stream on Prime Video, features Kim in the leading role as a Korean American former spy who is hiding out in Korea, only to discover that the group of assassins that has been sent to kill him is being led by the daughter he abandoned when she was 11. At a time when K-dramas like “Squid Game” and “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” are turning Korean actors into international stars, “Butterfly,” which features a mix of Korean and American actors, is being led by a Korean American.
“My goal was to bridge Korea and America with this project,” said Kim, who is producing the series through 3AD, the production company he founded in Los Angeles in 2013.
In many ways, actors of color have made progress, he said. “I think there’s never been a better time to be an Asian American in our industry.”
But Kim sees a lot of room for improvement, pointing out a study this year by the Asian American Foundation that found more than half of Americans couldn’t name a prominent Asian American. After “I can’t think of one,” the second and third most common responses were Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee.
“I don’t even take that as a personal affront,” Kim said with a laugh. “But I think about us as a community, how invisible we still are in 2024.”
A lot of these issues — visibility and representation, the idea of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners in this country — wend their way into “Yellow Face” in funny and thought-provoking ways. Although many of the historical particulars from that era seem absurd now — should a white actor ever wear eye-slanting prosthetics to play an Asian character, as Pryce did on the London stage in 1989? — the ideas are still relevant, some even more so, at a time when the sorts of criticism faced by Hwang back then have been amplified and accelerated by today’s polarized conversation around cultural identity.
“It’s no coincidence that the mainstream theatrical community feels like this is a story worth telling now,” Kim said.
As for the perils of taking on such a personal work, one fraught with such history and emotion, Kim welcomes it. “They say acting is failing,” he said. “And sometimes I’ve made the mistake of being scared to fail. The further you get in your career, the less you want to look bad at it.”
“But I really just want to have fun,” he continued. “There’s so much joy in what we do that sometimes gets overlooked in the business of it all. But at its core, it’s got to be fun.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
