Tuesday, November 16, 2004
HILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Television executives like to talk about "colorblind casting," a process that more often than not produces series pilots that are blindingly white.
Occasionally, that's followed, an episode or two later, by the addition of a minority actor or two, after the show's safely sold.
So how did ABC's "Lost," whose plane-crash scenario didn't make it conducive to parachuting in actors later on, manage to create one of TV's most diverse casts right from the beginning?
"I don't think it was colorblind ... I think it was color-conscious" casting, suggests actor Harold Perrineau ("Oz"), who plays Michael, a father getting to know his son (Malcolm David Kelley) for the first time.
Besides the black father and son, the show's core cast includes an Arab character (played by Naveen Andrews, a British actor of Indian descent) and a Korean couple, all stranded together on an island after a flight from Australia crashes. Plus, there's actor Jorge Garcia, whose character, Hurley, may not be Latino but certainly adds some diversity of his own as one of the larger characters on TV.
"Hey, that's what the world looks like. It doesn't look like 'The O.C,'" said Perrineau in an interview in Los Angeles this summer.
"From my point of view, the world looks like the island."
"What's cool about that, actually, is that on an international flight, you have people from all different countries, so it doesn't feel forced at all," agreed Daniel Dae Kim ("24," "Angel"), a Korean-born, American-reared actor whose "Lost" character, Jin, speaks no English whatsoever.
Kim owes his job in part to Yunjin Kim, the Korean-born actress who plays his wife, whose audition for another role in the show "blew us away," executive producer Damon Lindelof told reporters this summer. "We realized that she spoke fluent Korean and decided that we should have a Korean character on the island. And maybe it was a husband and wife."
Lindelof's fellow executive producer, J.J. Abrams, added that "one of the things we were talking about before then was we knew we wanted to have a couple that didn't speak English."
For Daniel Dae Kim, it's "an opportunity because I haven't had a chance to speak any Korean in any of the projects I've done. And I've really made it a point to try and take roles that are as assimilated as possible, so this is a real great chance to explore a whole different side of my career."