From the start of his career in Hollywood, Daniel Dae Kim didn’t see roadblocks. He saw opportunities.
Despite a lack of Asian characters in television and film, the Freedom High School graduate persevered, landing leading roles in TV hits “Lost” and “Hawaii 5-0.” He later fought for pay equal to his white co-stars’ on “Hawaii 5-0” and ultimately left the show over the issue.
Kim — who two years ago said “diversity is more than just a buzzword to me. It’s my life” — founded a production company because he wanted to have more say in what was being shown on TV and movie screens. He found almost immediate success last fall with the TV series “The Good Doctor,” about a young surgeon with autism. Featuring one of the most diverse casts on network TV, it became a monster hit on ABC.
“It’s important to not focus on the obstacle but on what’s possible,” Kim, 50, said in a recent telephone interview.
As he readies for Monday’s launch of the second season of “The Good Doctor,” Kim takes a look back at his career, his efforts to champion diversity and why he’s feeling more optimistic about Hollywood roles.
Roots in the Lehigh Valley
Born in Busan, South Korea, Kim spent the better part of his early life growing up in the Lehigh Valley. He attended Palmer Elementary School and Easton Middle School, then East Hills and Freedom High School in Bethlehem.
When accepting an ArtsQuest award last year, Kim talked about growing up in the Lehigh Valley.
“What I learned living here in the Valley was if you want something, you’re going to have to go get it,” Kim said in the message he delivered by videotape because he was out of the country. “It’s up to you to succeed. It takes facing obstacles to grow strong enough to overcome them.”
Kim said his time in the Valley provided a foundation for who he is today. He spoke honestly about the difficulties he had growing up as a minority in the 1980s. It was a core group of close friends, who are still in his life today, that kept him going. Many of those friends he met while attending Freedom High.
It was at Freedom that he had his first brush with acting.
“They asked me to do a painting for the play,” he said. “I loved art and I used to draw and paint a lot in high school so I agreed to paint a portrait of the lead.”
One of the actors dropped out and Kim was asked if he could step in.
“I played the role of a 70-year-old white person,” he said.
He graduated from Freedom in 1986 and went on to Haverford College outside Philadelphia. His plan at the time was to become a lawyer. But toward the end of his sophomore year, he decided to take an acting class, and that’s when his love of acting took hold. He graduated from Haverford College/Bryn Mawr College with bachelor’s degrees in theater and political science.
Kim then headed to New York City to embark on an acting career. He hustled, looking for work.
“As someone of Korean decent, I am certain my road was a bit hard,” Kim said. “I have to say anyone who’s an aspiring actor has a difficult road regardless of race. Opportunities were few and far between. I can see that now in the rear-view mirror.”
He found a home at the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, a theater on Eighth Avenue that’s devoted to nurturing Asian-American actors and plays by Asian-Americans.
“That was my lifeline,” Kim said.
His sense of self and determination impressed Tisa Chang, the theater’s founding artistic/producing director.
“Dan always seemed to be a couple steps ahead of us,” Chang said. “He was already thinking strategically.”
The theater often experiments with western classics. Kim performed in its version of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” updated to feature a modern setting and an Asian-American family.
“I’m happy to say he was really splendid in it,” Chang said.
As he continued to seek acting gigs, Kim enrolled in New York University’s graduate acting program, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Leading man
Kim picked up smaller roles in big TV shows such as “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” “NYPD Blue,” “Star Trek: Voyager,” “Charmed” and “ER,” and had recurring roles on “Angel” and “24.”
It was his role as Jin-Soo Kwon on ABC’s “Lost” that cemented him as a leading actor. The show followed the survivors of an airplane crash, which landed on a mysterious South Pacific island between Sydney and Los Angeles. It gained immediate critical acclaim and aired for six seasons.
Kim’s character was a Korean mobster and muscle man who was on the ill-fated flight with his wife. The role was challenging in a lot of ways. First, Kim had to relearn the language of his childhood, Korean. His character, Jin-Soo Kwon, spoke almost no English.
Kim also had to play the intense Jin in a way that was realistic and believable, but not a stereotype.
“I have been very careful not to take stereotypical roles, and this had the potential to become that,” Kim said. “I was comfortable to play Jin, and I mapped out the conflicts and what you see are layers to him. The role is one of the things I’m proudest of.”
While Jin initially was portrayed as a chauvinist and violent criminal, as the show progressed, it unveiled more about his upbringing and battle with class discrimination in flashbacks — and showed how deeply he loves his wife. Kim attributed much of the success of the character to the thoughtful and careful direction and writing of the characters.
The role made Kim a household name.
Just after “Lost” concluded, Kim went on to another leading TV role, Chin Ho Kelly in the reboot of “Hawaii Five-O.”
Through his roles on “Lost” and “Hawaii Five-O,” he also fell in love — with Hawaii, where both shows were shot. He and his wife, Mia, have raised their two children there.
“My family is there and I consider myself very lucky to have raised my kids there,” Kim said. “For an Asian-American family, it’s a very comfortable place to be.”
Taking (calculated) risks — and a stand
Kim decided to take a chance and make a return to his roots in New York theater. In 2016, he took on the role, complete with singing, of King Mongkut in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “The King and I” on Broadway.
It was also in 2016 that Kim became part of a movement to make the Academy Awards more diverse. He was among 683 people invited to join the Academy as voting members; 46 percent of those invited were women and 41 percent people of color. This came in the wake of a social media campaign, #OscarsSoWhite, over the lack of diversity in the Oscar nominations.
“It feels like a really substantive move,” Kim told The Hollywood Reporter. “ … [This class] only changes the makeup of the Academy by 2 or 3 percentage points, which gives you an idea of how lopsided the representation was to begin with.”
The Hollywood Reporter noted that, after the new members, the Academy would be 89 percent white, down from 92 percent, and 73 percent male, down from 75 percent.
Kim took another stand in 2017. It was just before the start of the eighth season of “Hawaii Five-0,” when Kim started salary negotiations with CBS. In a nutshell, Kim wanted the same salary as his white co-stars, Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan.
“To some of us, equality has been an issue for a long time,” Kim said. “I felt good about my work on the show and I felt like I was contributing to the show. I felt like my participation was worth a certain amount, and they disagreed.”
In a statement to his fans on his Facebook page in announcing his departure, Kim wrote: “As an Asian-American actor, I know first-hand how difficult it is to find opportunities at all, let alone play a well-developed, three-dimensional character like Chin Ho … The path to equality is rarely easy. But I hope you can be excited for the future. I am.”
Quitting the show was an opportunity to make a statement — a decision his former director, Tisa Chang, fully supported.
“Now is the time for so many people to stand up,” she said. “He is a role model and he sets an example and has demonstrated achievement. He wants people to have that too.”
As it turns out, another opportunity presented itself for Kim, and again it made a statement.
Actor Ed Skrein (who played Ajax in Marvel’s “Deadpool”) was cast as Ben Daimio in the reboot of Dark Horse Comics’ “Hellboy” movie. Skrein is white and, in the original comic, the character is Japanese-American. Skrein’s casting prompted an intense public backlash, with accusations that the role had been “whitewashed.” Skrein promptly exited, saying he wasn’t fully aware of the character’s background and felt it wasn’t right to play him.
Enter Kim.
“I felt like it was right and that this was supposed to be my next role,” Kim said. “This issue of whitewashing has been close to my consciousness for a long time. For me to have a small part in correcting this injustice was important to me.”
He reached out to Skrein and thanked him for stepping away from the role.
“It will take more people like him to make progress. But this highlights what a stand-up guy he is,” Kim said. “It moved me greatly.”
Filming “Hellboy” was the reason Kim couldn’t be in the Lehigh Valley last year to accept the ArtsQuest Foundation’s Pinnacle of the Arts Award.
“The success of someone who has resided in the Valley is an inspiration for all of us, particularly artists and students of the arts,” said Jeffrey A. Parks, founder of Musikfest, ArtsQuest and SteelStacks. “The success of becoming an internationally recognized actor in film and television is an achievement that can inspire others.”
Hope is the right medicine
Kim didn’t want to limit his career to just being an actor. He knew there was another role he could take, one that could make a difference — as executive producer.
In 2013, he founded a production company, 3AD, which seeks projects that spotlight groups of people not often seen on the big or small screen. Case in point: autistic adults.
He discovered “The Good Doctor” in South Korea, got the rights and convinced ABC it would be a hit show. “The Good Doctor” centers around Dr. Shaun Murphy, a talented young surgeon with autism and savant syndrome. It shows how he navigates daily life and his work at a prestigious hospital’s pediatric surgical unit. Much of the national emphasis about autism awareness has been on children. “The Good Doctor” is rare in its portrayal of an adult with autism in the workplace.
“The Good Doctor” was the biggest freshman hit of the 2017-2018 TV season, according to Variety. It came out of the gate so strongly that, after only two episodes, ABC picked it up for a full first season. It was the second-highest rated show on ABC, behind “Grey’s Anatomy.”
It’s a show that, at moments, has twists and turns that aren’t plausible. But at its heart, “The Good Doctor” is an uplifting show about surmounting challenges.
“I love it so much because it’s about an atypical hero,” Kim said. “We have at the center someone who has a core set of challenges and despite that, he’s a good person and a doctor. I can relate to that personally. It’s a metaphor for anyone who’s felt overlooked and underserved and feels like they have something to offer.”
His production company is developing and pitching other projects with diverse casts. But Kim continues to act. Next year, in addition to “Hellboy,” he will appear in “Always Be My Maybe,” a romantic comedy movie on Netflix with an all-Asian cast.
Maybe it’s a signal of a tide turning in Hollywood. “Crazy Rich Asians” spent several weeks as the country’s top movie, the first film to feature a largely all-Asian cast since 1993’s “The Joy Luck Club.”
“It gives me a sense of hope that I haven’t had in a long time,” Kim said.
