' I was like, 'All right, maybe that's a sign.'"
While in Los Angeles on a break from his show, Lee auditioned for the over-the-top playboy role and nailed it.
"A lot of guys played it so earnestly, it just came off cheesy. But Will, in a weird way, didn't believe in the line, so he put humor into it, and a smile, and it just worked," says Kahn.
Kahn believes that Lee, in real life, is a smooth character, and that audiences will have no problem seeing him as a romantic lead.
"Will's a strange bird," says Kahn. "He's kind of the neo-Asian guy. When I visited Korea, there'd be the Asian stud over there, and all the Asian girls would like him. Well, Will has that here, but he also has girls of all other races liking him, too. He kind of transcends racial lines because he's got a very sort of street flavor about him. Trust me, in the world that I live in, I see lots of pretty girls as a byproduct of being a music [video] director, and a lot of pretty girls like Will, so it definitely translates." |
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Kahn may have been convinced, but studio executives were not. Hollywood powers that be couldn't imagine an Asian man playing a sex symbol.
"Almost every other person in the entire process, and there's a lot of them, was opposed to it," says Kahn. "If I had one favor in casting, I used it."
"I know he fought hard for me," says Lee. "Sh-t, it's the reality of it, you know? At times you dwell on it, but I think if you dwell on it too long, it's gonna get in the way of your work.
"We're so used to playing the villain or the computer guy or this or that, so it was kind of nice to just play someone closer to me. I could speak the way I speak, and I didn't have to adopt a, you know, Laotian accent. I didn't have to put on my villain gear. It was cool, closer to me in the sense that my sensibilities were just me growing up in America." |
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