For decades, Asian characters in Hollywood films and television shows were commonly played by non-Asian actors, and then for a few more decades, the only Asians portrayed were martial artists in action flicks. Even in today’s increasingly multicultural America (according to the 2010 census, 5.6 percent of the population is Asian, and it’s the fastest-growing racial group in the United States ), Asians are still underrepresented in screen roles, making up only 3.8 percent of the TV and movie landscape. And it’s not for a lack of talent — there are plenty of actors of full or partial Asian heritage working in showbiz. Here are 8 Asian-American stars making the industry ever so slightly more diverse.
1. Lucy Liu
Actress, painter, and humanitarian Lucy Liu speaks six languages, including Mandarin, which she spoke with her parents, who are from Beijing and Shanghai. Liu got her big break on the television show Ally McBeal in 1998, then co-starred in the Charlie’s Angels film reboot.
She currently co-stars as Joan Watson in CBS’s Sherlock Holmes modernization, Elementary. Today, the New York native travels the world as a UNICEF ambassador — which is no surprise, considering she grew up in Queens, one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the world. In 2014, Liu combined movie making and advocacy to direct her first short film, which explores human trafficking and child sex slavery in Mumbai, India. Liu has also donated the sale proceeds of her abstract paintings to UNICEF.
2. Daniel Dae Kim
On the ABC drama Lost, Kim so convincingly played a crash survivor who initially spoke no English that many fans were surprised to learn that Kim had lived in the United States since he was a young boy and is an alumnus of venerable East Coast colleges Haverford College and New York University.
Kim recently finished his fourth season on CBS’ Hawaii Five-O and has been cast in Insurgent, the sequel to this year’s popular dystopian thriller Divergent. In 2013, Kim also signed a two-year development deal with CBS and now hopes to produce a film about North Korean defectors and a remake of the South Korean hospital drama Good Doctor. Although Kim left his native Pusan at age 8, he still has an aunt living in his hometown, and he is married to a Seoul native.
3. Grace Park
Los Angeles born and Canadian raised, Park graduated from the same Vancouver high school as Matrix star Carrie-Anne Moss. Park began modeling at age 18, and after several years, she headed to Hong Kong to work in commercials, music videos, and movies. From 2000 to 2004, she appeared in the Canadian teen drama Edgemont. Then Park’s career rocketed into space with a starring role as Boomer in the 2003 hit remake of Battlestar Galactica.
After living on the West Coast in the U.S., Park had to bolster her ties to her Korean ancestry for her first feature film, 2008’s crime drama West 32nd (named for the street that centers New York City’s Koreatown). Park told the Vancouver Sun that she doesn’t “even hang out with Korean Americans … I had to really learn my Korean. Because my accent was really bad, apparently. I thought it was fine.”
4. Harry Shum Jr.
To a generation of Glee fans, Harry Shum Jr. will always be Mike Chang, the McKinley High football player who turned into the glee club’s best dancer and choreographer, even if his voice wasn’t quite up to Kurt and Finn’s standards. Shum was born in Puerto Limon, Costa Rica, into the Latin American country’s Cantonese-speaking Chinese community, but his family moved to San Francisco when he was 6. A dancer from an early age, he was the only male dancer on BET’s Comic View when he was 20 and went on to land lead-dancing gigs on tours for such superstars as Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, and Mariah Carey.
In addition to his five-season gig on Glee, Shum appeared in Step Up 2, Step Up 3D, Stomp the Yard, the web series Mortal Kombat: Legacy, and the upcoming crime thriller Revenge of the Green Dragons. Shum has joked about being a polyglot, especially since people don’t expect him to understand Spanish: “I’ll use [Spanish] more if someone’s talking crap about me, then I can retaliate because they don’t know I speak it,” he told Zap2It.
5. Maggie Q
Half Vietnamese, half European mix (Polish, Irish, French), Maggie Q (Quigley to her parents) was born and raised in Hawaii but moved to Asia to launch her modeling career after graduating from high school. The fashion-model-turned-actress is best known to English-speaking audiences for the CW’s primetime take on Nikita, the fourth Die Hard sequel (Live Free or Die Hard), and Mission Impossible 3, but she actually started acting a decade earlier in 1998, when Jackie Chan spotted her and managed her early career in Hong Kong cinema. She even learned Cantonese for her roles.
Despite her many performances as a sexy woman who can kill, Maggie hopes she’s more than a stereotype: “Not only do I not want to be stereotyped as this Asian girl who fights — gee, what a wonder — but also I have more to offer than that.”
6. Hailee Steinfeld
The 17-year-old actress might have a Jewish surname, but Hailee Steinfeld is also half Filipino on her mother’s side. The Los Angeles-raised daughter of a personal trainer, Peter Steinfeld, and an interior designer, Cheri Domasin, Steinfeld realizes she’s somewhat of ethnic chameleon, so she loves it when people recognize her heritage: “I found that the best thing when I am in a group of people, I would have one or two people come up to me and say, ‘You are Filipino!’ I am Filipino, too. And I am like ‘Yes, this is awesome!’ So it is sort of this one thing that connected me with many people that I find is really interesting,” she told Yahoo.
Steinfeld, who started acting at 8 but broke out with a role that earned her an Academy Award nomination — playing Mattie Ross in the Coen Brothers’ 2010 remake of True Grit. She’s also played Juliet to Douglas Booth’s Romeo in 2013, young warrior Petra in Ender’s Game, and Mark Ruffalo’s daughter in Begin Again. Steinfeld is set to star opposite Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson in next year’s much-anticipated Pitch Perfect 2.
7. BD Wong
One of Hollywood’s most recognizable Asian character actors, Wong is a third-generation Chinese American hailing from San Francisco. The stage-and-screen star first broke out with a Tony-winning performance in M Butterfly in 1988. Wong is best known for his long-running roles on critically acclaimed dramas such as HBO’s Oz and NBC’s Law & Order: SVU, on which he played forensic psychiatrist Dr. George Huang for nine seasons.
The openly gay actor came out via a memoir in 2003 about his and his former partner’s experiences having premature twins (one of whom died shortly after birth) via a surrogate, Following Foo: The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man. In 2003, he explained his reluctance to come out: “Up until now, acting was really my entire world, and I really felt strongly that I was supposed to be an actor, but I entered a field that was particularly non-welcoming to me as an Asian-American. The opportunities already were somewhat limited to me, so it felt almost like a kind of career suicide to be completely out as a gay man.”
8. Keanu Reeves
Reeves, who played a half-Japanese samurai in 2013’s 47 Ronin is partially Asian by way of multicultural Hawaii. His father hails from a sprawling, multiracial Oahu clan that looks to Ireland, England, Portugal, Korea, China, the Philippines, and Japan for its ancestry.
Reeves also connected with his heritage with his 2013 directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi, about a martial arts expert whose skills land him in an underworld fight club. “My grandmother is Chinese and Hawaiian, so I was around Chinese art, furniture and cuisine when I was growing up,” Reeves told a Filipino newspaper. “I remember that I really liked haikus. I also liked animé and kung fu movies — so, yeah, I was exposed to Asian culture since I was a kid.”