Daniel Dae Kim finds life is good on 'Lost'

[Sydney]

Freedom grad Daniel Dae Kim finds life is good on 'Lost'

By Tom Coombe
Of The Morning Call


So far this season on the ABC drama "Lost," Daniel Dae Kim's character Jin Kwon has survived a plane crash and has been stranded on an island, handcuffed, estranged from his wife, and (falsely) accused of setting an escape raft on fire. To make matters worse, he appears to be the only one of the island's 40-some castaways who doesn't speak English.

Unlike Jin, things look pretty good for the real-life Kim, a 1986 graduate of Freedom High School whose parents live in Bethlehem Township. He has a role in the summer horror movie "The Cave," will spend the next few weeks in Chekov's "Ivanov" on Broadway, and has a prominent role on one of the shows that has helped pull ABC out of the ratings gutter. On top of all that, he gets to work in Hawaii.

"It's everything you think it would be," Kim says of life in the Aloha State, which doubles as "Lost"s unnamed island, as well as the setting for the show's flashback sequence. That scene two weeks ago that showed Kate back home in Iowa with her childhood sweetheart? Hawaii.

For the uninitiated, each episode of "Lost" -- aside from the pilot and season finale -- focuses on one character, tying their adventures on the island to events in their pre-plane-crash life. In Jin's case, we learn that he grew up in a Korean fishing village and married Sun (Yoon-jin Kim), the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Jin goes to work with his father-in-law; although his actual duties aren't clear, they involve -- in one case -- threatening a government safety inspector.

Of course, we don't find out everything about Jin's past until the 17th episode. Things weren't much different for Kim. He got a general outline about his character early on, but discovered new things as the show progressed.

"That was a fantastic way to work," he says.

So, what was the biggest surprise about his character?



"That's a good question," he says, and thinks for a minute. "That he had a soft spot for babies," referring to an episode where Jin delivers a baby.

"Scratch that," he adds a moment later. The bigger, and in a way, nicer surprise was learning that Jin came from the sort of small fishing village in which Kim was born before coming to the United States. It's a testament to the show's creators, he says, to be able to base little pieces of their characters on the actors playing them.

Unlike Jin, who only speaks Korean, Kim is bilingual, although you wouldn't know it from some press accounts, which have the actor speaking only English.

"Korean was the first language I learned," he says. "It was never as if I didn't know it."

But Kim had learned a South Korean dialect of the language, and spoke it with an American accent, two things that wouldn't jibe with his character. Yoon-jin Kim, he says, has helped make Jin believable.

The two actors haven't had much screen time together in recent weeks -- Jin stopped talking to Sun when he found out she could speak English and hadn't told him -- and had an emotional reconciliation scene last week.

Jin, about to leave the island on a raft he helped build, tearfully apologizes to his wife, promises to rescue her, and says he's been sent to the island as punishment. Kim says the scene was one of the most exciting moments for him.

"Jin hasn't had many emotionally vulnerable moments," Kim says.

The raft was built by the show's crew, which needed to work at a slow pace to make it seem as if it was being built by the characters.

"It's actually more seaworthy than some of the camera boats we use," Kim says.

As the next-to-last episode of "Lost" closed last week, Jin and three other castaways had set sail, hoping to find a way to get everyone else off the island. Those left behind were preparing for a possible attack by the shadowy "others," and trying to open the mysterious hatch in the jungle. But Kim can't or won't answer what will happen.

"The story line with the hatch will progress," he says, "and there will be a lot of danger on the raft."

Does that mean Jin won't survive? Again, no one's talking. But Kim says he's due back in Hawaii in July for season two of "Lost." That season may include work with fellow Bethlehem native Daniel Roebuck, a graduate of neighboring Liberty High School, who has guest starred as Dr. Arzt since the May 11 episode and will appear in Wednesday's finale.

In addition to "Lost," Kim has appeared recently in "Spider-Man 2" and had a recurring role on two seasons of "24," playing Agent Baker. Field agents on "24" tend to have the same life span of small insects, but Baker, as far as Kim knows, is still alive.

"He could technically come back," Kim says, but for now, he's headed back to the island.

tom.coombe@mcall.com



Note: http://www.mcall.com/features/all-kim-lost...ll-features-hed