[KingPriest2]

Kim Talks About the 'Lost' Art of Being Jin
(Thursday, February 17 12:30 PM)
By Kate O'Hare
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) "I was reading a SAG [Screen Actors Guild] report," says "Lost" star Daniel Dae Kim. "Did you know there were only 61 roles, in all of television, on every network, for Asian-American males [last year]? Sixty-one.
"That's why something like this show is so important, and that's one of the reasons I'm really proud to be part of it."

However many roles there are this year, Kim ("Angel," "24," "The Hulk") has one of them. On the Wednesday-night adventure drama, created by J.J. Abrams ("Alias"), Damon Lindelof ("Crossing Jordan") and Jeffrey Lieber ("Tuck Everlasting"), Kim plays Jin, a Korean man who, together with his wife, Sun (Yunjin Kim), and 40-odd other people, survived a plane crash on a deserted and enigmatic tropical island.


As the show has progressed, flashbacks in each episode illuminate the characters' histories. "House of the Rising Sun," which aired in October, showed how Jin and Sun met and married, then how their marriage disintegrated after Jin went to work for Sun's mysterious father.
Sun secretly learned English and was going to abandon her bullying husband before getting on the fateful flight, but changed her mind at the last moment.

Jin has been hostile toward some other survivors, partly because of the language barrier. Sun, in fear of her husband, has kept her English skills under wraps, except for Kate (Evangeline Lilly), who has plenty of secrets of her own.

Sun has also had a bit of a flirtation with Michael (Harold Perrineau), an African-American with a young son, Walt (Malcolm David Kelley). This has not escaped Jin's notice, and the two men have clashed.

"Anything that gives our characters depth and dramatic situations is good," Kim says. "We'll see how it polarizes the audience or polarizes the people on the island. Exploration can be worthwhile, but whether or not I want to see Jin cuckolded, I'm not sure."

On Wednesday, Feb. 23, in an episode called "... In Translation," Michael accuses Jin of sabotaging the survivors' raft, escalating their rivalry, and Sun surprises everyone with a revelation.

"The episode will raise a lot of questions," Kim says, "but it will also answer a lot of questions. The audience will see Jin in a different light. There's the question of who Sun's father really is.

"He's a very powerful man, and powerful men have their fingers in a lot of pies. In Korea, there are large corporations, similar to Japan's corporations, and they don't handle just one industry, they have products that span every industry. They're mega-corporations, and her father is the head of one."

In one scene, Jin was seen washing blood off of his hands after returning from an errand for Sun's father.

"You're going to find out the reason there was blood involved," Kim says. "What's great about the show's structure is we're now seeing how interconnected these people are, on purpose or inadvertently. Part of that, in this episode, is you're going to see flip sides of scenes we've already seen.

"You're going to see what happened after that scene in 'The House of the Rising Sun,' and you're going to see the continuation of that. And we're going to see certain events told from Jin's perspective as opposed to Sun's."

The Jin-Sun dynamic so far has been her overtly cowering from his aggressiveness, while secretly rebelling. There was a moment in the pilot where he yelled at her to button her shirt up all the way, but when he turned away, Sun opened the top button.

"People actually clapped when they saw her do that at the premiere," Kim says. "She's definitely got some audience sympathy."

Although Jin hasn't generated much sympathy from the viewers, he has from the actor who plays him.

"This is the way I think about Jin," Kim says. "He is a man who commits 100 percent of himself to the thing he believes in. Once he got to the island, he fund out that the things he believed in were not necessarily worth believing in. It really shook his world. He's in a recovery process, so he's questioning everything about himself.

"He's questioning the choices he's made about his past. It's leaving him very vulnerable and insecure and scared. That's why he takes the actions he does sometimes. My favorite thing about the [Feb. 23] episode is that emotionally the stakes were incredibly high.

"Jin, on the island, is so hard and standoffish, but in my episode, you see him being totally the opposite. You see him being loving, you see him being loyal. You see him being honorable. You see him being compassionate."

Born in South Korea but raised near Philadelphia, Kim would also like to see Jin broaden his language skills. "He's got to learn English. We can't be in season five and Jin just grunting all the time. The island is magical, so I'm hoping there'll be some magic for Jin."

At the same time, Kim depends on help from his more fluent co-star, who appeared in South Korean TV shows and movies, for help brushing up his own rusty native language.

"Yunjin laughs at me," Kim says. "She's been great about it. She commented to me the other day that my Korean has improved dramatically."

He admits he may still sound strange to speakers of standard Korean. "My entire family is from Pusan, which is the deep south of Korea. So all of us there speak with an accent equivalent to someone from Georgia."