Oh, the mysteries of ABC's hit series "Lost." Where are the doomed passengers of Oceanic Flight 815? How did they survive the plane crash? And why are they all so darn good-looking?
On an island full intriguing characters, Daniel Dae Kim's Jin Kwon has been almost as confounding as the show's cursed lottery numbers. Already one of the few Asian characters on prime-time television, Jin has not spoken a word of English all season. A risky decision, even for a show as smart as "Lost."
"I am so grateful to [executive producers] J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof for taking the chance on having a character who doesn't speak the language for an entire season," Kim, 36, said. "I think it's really doing a lot for what we deem acceptable on television and what we can expect the viewer to follow."
The idea to have characters who don't speak English occurred to the producers when Yunjin Kim (no relation), who plays Jin's wife Sun, auditioned for the role of Kate.
"She was phenomenal," Lindelof said. "It wasn't like she was wrong for Kate, but we thought: How interesting would it be to have a character who doesn't speak English? You would really have this opportunity to do something that doesn't really exist on network television."
So they cast Yunjin as Sun (the role of Kate went to Evangeline Lilly) and gave Sun a husband. Kim auditioned for the role -- and suddenly found himself relocating with his wife and two children to Hawaii, where the show films. As the season unfolded, Sun and Jin's heartbreaking back-story was revealed: A tale of two innocent young people passionately in love before Jin is corrupted by Sun's criminal father. Eventually, viewers discovered that Sun speaks English -- but Jin remains confined to subtitles.
This meant Kim, who was born in Busan, South Korea, but raised in New York and Pennsylvania, had to seriously brush up on his Korean. "It was one of the biggest challenges of my career," he said. "I wasn't fluent."
He relied on Yunjin and the show's translator to help him capture the cadence of the language. "For me, it wasn't so much that I wasn't pronouncing the word correctly, but the melody of the lines was different," he said. "So it was just a matter of trying to get the tonality of speech down."
Like many viewers, Kim was worried that Jin could be perceived as a cliched stoic and inscrutable Asian man.
"That was actually one of my biggest questions when I started," Kim said. "The character wasn't a sympathetic character by any means, so I was a little bit concerned that he might come off as one-dimensional or somewhat stereotypical -- and sure enough, after the pilot, I did receive some criticism for exactly that.
"There will always be a small minority of people who always want my character to be nothing but a hero who speaks fluent Korean and saves the day," Kim said. "I think there's much more value in a character that's complex and can really hold your interest for the long term."
Kim said he's aware that his role comes with a somewhat heavy burden.
