I thought of myself as a white guy
I thought of myself as a white guy
Korean-American TV heart-throb Daniel Henney, who will act in his first dramatic role in My Father, says he had racist encounters growing up in Michigan
-- PHOTO: CATHAY ORGANISATION
SEOUL - One of the most popular TV stars in South Korea admits he speaks Korean like a 12-year-old. Confesses he wouldn't be able to handle a Korean-language script and isn't completely comfortable expressing emotions in a Korean way. Says the nature of Korean family relationships still eludes him.
Fortunately for Daniel Henney - born in the United States to an ethnic Korean mother and American father of British descent - none of these shortcomings hurts if you're always cast as the Asian-looking American trying to navigate love and relationships in Korea.
A mere two years after arriving in South Korea with a single suitcase and a one-shot contract for a TV commercial, Henney, 27, has become one of the country's most famous TV and movie heart-throbs.
In the process, he has created a new acting niche: roles for a cultural hybrid with Korean roots, coming in from the West and struggling to master love and relationships.
'I definitely wouldn't understand a Korean father-son relationship, but then luckily enough for me, my character doesn't either,' says the cheerful Henney about his first dramatic role in the upcoming film My Father.
He plays a Korean adopted into an American family, stationed as a US soldier in South Korea and searching for his birth parents. He finds the man believed to be his father: a murderer living on death row.
'I definitely wouldn't understand a Korean father-son relationship, but then luckily enough for me, my character doesn't either'
'Koreans feel the same emotions as everyone else, but they express them differently: in the way they argue, the way they shout, the way they pout,' he says.
'It would have been difficult if my character was Korean. But he's just an American kid.'
My Father is his attempt to burst out of the romantic-comedy roles - like the wildly popular 2005 TV series My Lovely Samsoon - that have shot him to fame in South Korea.
After begging network executives to take a chance on a foreigner, the then unknown model-actor landed the supporting role of Dr Henry Kim in My Lovely Samsoon.
It got Henney attention for his looks and the fact that he portrayed a handsome, successful Korean American in Korea as something other than a caricature.
He followed his first splash with last year's Spring Waltz, another light romance in which he played a considerate, if very hot, foreign manager of a musician.
He also resumed an earlier, aborted modelling career, appearing with Gwyneth Paltrow in a massive campaign for the South Korean clothing brand Bean Pole. His popularity has led to a dozen ad campaigns.
He moved to the big screen last year in Seducing Mr Perfect, a comedy about love in a Seoul office. The movie was released last Christmas, and by then he was such a phenomenon that the opening was hyped as a showdown against Rain, the Korean mega-pop star who was making his movie debut in I'm A Cyborg. (Instead, both films did good but unspectacular business, blown out of the water by a goofy comedy about plastic surgery, 200 Pounds Beauty.)
My Father is his attempt to break the typecasting. He still plays an Asian American. But this time, the subject matter is raw: an exploration not only of family ties but also of his character's emerging awareness of his Korean identity.
'At times I think the movie was above my abilities,' he says.
'There is some tough stuff. I poured my heart into it, but there were scenes that really pushed the limits of human emotion.'
The producers are also hoping the adoption theme will resonate in a country that was once the largest exporter of orphans to the United States, and remains the world's fourth-largest provider of adopted children.
Among the thousands orphaned and sent abroad was Henney's mother, Christine, born in the southern port city of Busan but adopted, along with her brother, into an American family when she was just one.
'She always kept the clothing she'd come over in, but she never had the money or the means to find out about her own parents,' he says. 'And there's always a fear of what you'll find.'
His father is an American, with family roots in England, and the actor says he spent little time thinking about his mixed ethnicity as a kid growing up in small-town Michigan, 'a very naive place of 1,100 people where all the kids there ever thought about was hunting and fishing. I always just thought of myself as a white guy', he says.
But race was not ignored. There was teasing from friends, who would bow to him, or tease him about the ramen noodles his mother stocked in the kitchen. And there were racially instigated fistfights as well: two a week, he has told interviewers, although he declines to quantify the scrapping when pressed. 'I grew up in a rural area,' he says, shrugging at the memory. 'You get your racism there.'
His first ambition was to play basketball, and he was good enough that scholarships helped him chase that dream through three colleges.
He ended up at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he made the team but rode the bench. By then he was also acting in student theatre.
His first jobs after university were as a model that took him to Europe and Hong Kong. It was in Hong Kong that he first embraced his Asian background, he says.
Tiring of modelling, he settled in New York in 2004 to try stage acting. There wasn't a big demand for Asian Americans off-Broadway.
He played an Italian, an Irishman, Happy in Death Of A Salesman. He also auditioned for parts on TV's The O.C. and One Tree Hill. 'I was just getting my feet wet when my manager called encouraging me to come to Korea for a commercial,' he says of the May 2005 decision that brought him here for the first time. Two years later, Seoul is Danny's town.
He says he is so busy working that he has had no time to find real love there. 'I keep waiting for someone to introduce me to some celebrities,' he jokes.
He insists he could be happy working only in Asia only and the potential for wider stardom is enormous. The Japanese, who have a proven market for Korean stars, are just beginning to notice the Henney phenomenon, sending reporters to Seoul to interview him.
'The Japanese see me as a Korean, not an American,' he says.
LAT
Korean-American TV heart-throb Daniel Henney, who will act in his first dramatic role in My Father, says he had racist encounters growing up in Michigan
-- PHOTO: CATHAY ORGANISATION
SEOUL - One of the most popular TV stars in South Korea admits he speaks Korean like a 12-year-old. Confesses he wouldn't be able to handle a Korean-language script and isn't completely comfortable expressing emotions in a Korean way. Says the nature of Korean family relationships still eludes him.
Fortunately for Daniel Henney - born in the United States to an ethnic Korean mother and American father of British descent - none of these shortcomings hurts if you're always cast as the Asian-looking American trying to navigate love and relationships in Korea.
A mere two years after arriving in South Korea with a single suitcase and a one-shot contract for a TV commercial, Henney, 27, has become one of the country's most famous TV and movie heart-throbs.
In the process, he has created a new acting niche: roles for a cultural hybrid with Korean roots, coming in from the West and struggling to master love and relationships.
'I definitely wouldn't understand a Korean father-son relationship, but then luckily enough for me, my character doesn't either,' says the cheerful Henney about his first dramatic role in the upcoming film My Father.
He plays a Korean adopted into an American family, stationed as a US soldier in South Korea and searching for his birth parents. He finds the man believed to be his father: a murderer living on death row.
'I definitely wouldn't understand a Korean father-son relationship, but then luckily enough for me, my character doesn't either'
'Koreans feel the same emotions as everyone else, but they express them differently: in the way they argue, the way they shout, the way they pout,' he says.
'It would have been difficult if my character was Korean. But he's just an American kid.'
My Father is his attempt to burst out of the romantic-comedy roles - like the wildly popular 2005 TV series My Lovely Samsoon - that have shot him to fame in South Korea.
After begging network executives to take a chance on a foreigner, the then unknown model-actor landed the supporting role of Dr Henry Kim in My Lovely Samsoon.
It got Henney attention for his looks and the fact that he portrayed a handsome, successful Korean American in Korea as something other than a caricature.
He followed his first splash with last year's Spring Waltz, another light romance in which he played a considerate, if very hot, foreign manager of a musician.
He also resumed an earlier, aborted modelling career, appearing with Gwyneth Paltrow in a massive campaign for the South Korean clothing brand Bean Pole. His popularity has led to a dozen ad campaigns.
He moved to the big screen last year in Seducing Mr Perfect, a comedy about love in a Seoul office. The movie was released last Christmas, and by then he was such a phenomenon that the opening was hyped as a showdown against Rain, the Korean mega-pop star who was making his movie debut in I'm A Cyborg. (Instead, both films did good but unspectacular business, blown out of the water by a goofy comedy about plastic surgery, 200 Pounds Beauty.)
My Father is his attempt to break the typecasting. He still plays an Asian American. But this time, the subject matter is raw: an exploration not only of family ties but also of his character's emerging awareness of his Korean identity.
'At times I think the movie was above my abilities,' he says.
'There is some tough stuff. I poured my heart into it, but there were scenes that really pushed the limits of human emotion.'
The producers are also hoping the adoption theme will resonate in a country that was once the largest exporter of orphans to the United States, and remains the world's fourth-largest provider of adopted children.
Among the thousands orphaned and sent abroad was Henney's mother, Christine, born in the southern port city of Busan but adopted, along with her brother, into an American family when she was just one.
'She always kept the clothing she'd come over in, but she never had the money or the means to find out about her own parents,' he says. 'And there's always a fear of what you'll find.'
His father is an American, with family roots in England, and the actor says he spent little time thinking about his mixed ethnicity as a kid growing up in small-town Michigan, 'a very naive place of 1,100 people where all the kids there ever thought about was hunting and fishing. I always just thought of myself as a white guy', he says.
But race was not ignored. There was teasing from friends, who would bow to him, or tease him about the ramen noodles his mother stocked in the kitchen. And there were racially instigated fistfights as well: two a week, he has told interviewers, although he declines to quantify the scrapping when pressed. 'I grew up in a rural area,' he says, shrugging at the memory. 'You get your racism there.'
His first ambition was to play basketball, and he was good enough that scholarships helped him chase that dream through three colleges.
He ended up at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he made the team but rode the bench. By then he was also acting in student theatre.
His first jobs after university were as a model that took him to Europe and Hong Kong. It was in Hong Kong that he first embraced his Asian background, he says.
Tiring of modelling, he settled in New York in 2004 to try stage acting. There wasn't a big demand for Asian Americans off-Broadway.
He played an Italian, an Irishman, Happy in Death Of A Salesman. He also auditioned for parts on TV's The O.C. and One Tree Hill. 'I was just getting my feet wet when my manager called encouraging me to come to Korea for a commercial,' he says of the May 2005 decision that brought him here for the first time. Two years later, Seoul is Danny's town.
He says he is so busy working that he has had no time to find real love there. 'I keep waiting for someone to introduce me to some celebrities,' he jokes.
He insists he could be happy working only in Asia only and the potential for wider stardom is enormous. The Japanese, who have a proven market for Korean stars, are just beginning to notice the Henney phenomenon, sending reporters to Seoul to interview him.
'The Japanese see me as a Korean, not an American,' he says.
LAT
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