In January, the actor Randall Park premiered his directorial debut, Shortcomings, at Sundance. Adapted from Adrian Tomine’s celebrated 2007 graphic novel of the same name, the film is about a group of aimless twentysomething Asian Americans trying—and mostly failing—to grow up.
Once the credits started rolling, the audience broke into eager applause, and the movie earned a distribution deal from Sony Pictures Classics shortly thereafter.
But despite the film’s warm reception, Park spent the entire screening fidgeting in his seat, on the verge of a stomach ulcer. “It wasn’t fun for me,” Park says. “I had so much anxiety.”
Some of Park’s unease stemmed from garden-variety rookie director quibbles, of course. “I kept seeing things and going, Ugh, I wish I’d done it this way,” he says. But he was also experiencing the trepidation that comes with putting something truly novel into the world.
When it hits theaters on August 4, Shortcomings will represent the culmination of a 16-year journey for Park, who first stumbled upon Tomine’s book shortly after it was published and immediately dreamed of bringing it to the screen. “I’d revisit the book every few years and think, Gosh, this would make such a great project,” Park recalls. “But it never felt like it could be done, because it was the type of story it just didn’t seem there was any kind of support for in the industry. It was hard enough for Asian Americans to tell any story, let alone something niche like that.”
What makes Shortcomings so niche is this: Virtually all its characters are narcissistic, largely unlikable jerks. Chief amongst them is the protagonist Ben, played by Justin H. Min, a self-loathing Japanese American film snob who struggles with a fixation on white women—much to the chagrin of his long-suffering Japanese girlfriend Miko (Ally Maki)—and spends the movie in a downward spiral, caustically pushing everyone in his life away. Coming hot on the heels of Beef, Shortcomings is at the forefront of a new wave of Asian American stories that feel like they’re allowed to be about more than meditations on cultural identity.
“Our movie doesn’t have those kinds of traditional tropes you find in a lot of Asian American movies,” Park says. “Family, the intergenerational stuff, going back to the motherland. Those are the things, I think, that give mainstream audiences this sense of cultural tourism. But when the story is just about hanging out and walking around and going to diners, it’s like, ‘Well, we can do that. Why would we want that from you?’”
It took Park a long time to get here. When we meet in Los Angeles, it’s a few hours before the second annual Gold Gala, a celebration of AAPI leaders in culture and society, which Park will be attending as an honored guest. We’re sitting in the living room of a hotel suite across the street from the venue, which the event provided for Park and his wife Jae Suh to get dressed in. All around us, perched on every available surface, are gleaming magnums of Armand de Brignac champagne—a.k.a. “Ace of Spades,” as Jay-Z, who co-owns the brand, likes to call it—one of the Gala’s liquor sponsors.
“It looks like I had a wild night,” Park says with a chuckle. “Just popping bottles.” He’s yet to put on his midnight blue tuxedo for the night, and is instead dressed in a style I’d best describe as LA denimhead: beat-to-hell selvedge jeans, beefy silver chain peeking out from the collar of his fitted navy tee, and a pair of sick buckled leather shoes placed neatly in the corner. At 49, Park has grown into a lean, rugged handsomeness—his exposed forearms are ropy and sunkissed, and I clock a faint tattoo that reads “Ruby,” the name of his 10-year-old daughter.
Normally, Park says, big events make him a little uncomfortable. But the Gold Gala feels different. “The bonds feel stronger,” he says. “It just feels almost like family, community. There’s just more of a freedom.”
It’s the same freedom he sought out in his twenties, back when he was working as a graphic designer, scratching an incessant itch to perform by doing standup after hours. “When I first started,” Park remembers, “I couldn’t get [stage time] in any rooms outside of open mics. But there was the Asian show at the Laugh Factory, and I was able to get on there and actually get some reps in.”
In the early 2010s, years after Park had begun acting full-time, outlets like Wong Fu Productions—an Asian-led sketch comedy Youtube channel—gave him a creative platform in the sometimes long stretches between booking roles. “Just getting that opportunity to perform and to feel like, Oh, I think I can do this—that all came from this community.”
Still, Park’s path to steady success was precarious at best. He was nearly 30 and still living with his parents when he finally decided to surreptitiously quit his day job and pursue acting. “It was a secret life,” Park says. “My parents thought I was lost, working these random jobs at Starbucks.” In the early days, when he was still struggling to book bit parts on network shows, he thought about quitting constantly. “One time, I did quit,” he says. “I thought I was supposed to be an architect.” Thankfully, a basic prerequisite physics class he signed up for convinced him otherwise. “Two days into class, I didn’t understand anything. I was so out of practice. Also, I was just dumb,” he says, laughing. “I stopped showing up and was like, ‘I guess I’ll go back to auditioning.’”
Slowly, things began to click. He spent a year in the cast of the Nick Cannon sketch vehicle Wild ‘n Out, and eventually booked a series of small but memorable guest spots on sitcoms like Curb Your Enthusiasm, New Girl, and The Office—his brief turn as “Asian Jim” on the latter wound up going viral online about a decade later. “Nobody talked about that scene when it came out,” he says, “but now some people think I was on that show as a regular cast member.”
Park thought his big break had finally arrived when Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg hired him to play Kim Jong Un in 2014’s The Interview. He was proud of his depiction of the North Korean despot—careful not to play a “cartoonish bad guy without any kind of levels to him”—and the movie was testing extremely well with audiences in the lead-up to its release. “Even the head of the studio, Amy Pascal, was like, ‘This is going to be incredible for you.’” And then the Sony hacks happened, and it all went away.
“It felt like everything crumbled,” Park says. “At that point, it was bigger than my career. It was like: God, what’s going to happen to the world?” Reporters were parked outside of Park’s house at all hours. Sony had to hire private security to protect his family. He’d go for a drive and spot cars full of paparazzi chasing behind him in his rearview mirror. By the time the chaos was over—“Bill Cosby ended up in the news, and everything just stopped”—Park had slipped into a depression. “The movie finally came out and was eviscerated critically,” he says. “It was like, gosh, that was my shot. That was my shot. And it didn’t happen.”
Thankfully, by that stage, Park had already filmed his actual big break: the debut season of Fresh Off the Boat, the first-ever network series with an entirely Asian American main cast, on which he played the mild-mannered Taiwanese patriarch Louis Huang. “At the time, I thought it had no chance,” Park admits. “It was a great show. A lot of good shows don’t make it, and there were no shows about Asian families. I bought into what the industry had been saying: that the audience wouldn’t connect with these stories, that the country was too racist for people to want to watch it.” Instead, the show was an immediate hit, running six seasons and helping to lay the groundwork for the Asian American pop cultural explosion we’re now living through.
Doors were finally swinging wide open for Park. He co-wrote and starred in the 2019 Netflix romcom Always Be My Maybe opposite his longtime pal Ali Wong—a movie that, in retrospect, now feels like a sneaky precursor to the more nuanced work both its leads are doing today. “When I was watching Beef,” Park says, “I was thinking a little bit about Always Be My Maybe, just even the class status of the characters. It felt right up my alley, because that’s the stuff I’m interested in: I want to see working-class Asian American families on screen, I want to see a whole spectrum of experiences. We’re slowly exploring that, which I think is cool.”
In 2019, Park co-founded a production company, Imminent Collision, with his creative partners Michael Golamco and Hieu Ho—whom he first met and began writing plays with as an undergrad at UCLA. That, at long last, paved the way for Park to bring Shortcomings to life as a film. After all those years of waiting, Park ran at the challenge of directing a feature at full tilt. “I was almost blown away by how comfortable I felt in that position,” he says. “Being involved in every facet, feeling like the leader of this team, reshaping your vision with the help of others—all of it was really exciting to me.”
And despite his shaky moments at Sundance, Park is immensely proud of the finished product. “It’s a real reflection of me as a person,” he says. “I like the idea of intimacy and nuance, while also being funny and keeping things small. That’s how I live my life, and that’s my approach to filmmaking—not just in the stuff that ends up on screen, but also in the collaboration and the making of the film.”
All that said, when I ask Park if he’s ready to pivot to directing full-time, he shakes his head. Directing was a joy, he tells me, but it also was an obsessive, years-long, around-the-clock slog that he would need to find precisely the right project to gear up for again. Right now, more than anything, he has his sights set on hitting new heights as an actor.
“I’m approaching 50,” he says, “and I feel like I started in this business so late. It took a lot of time for me to find my footing, so I have this plan to make this my best decade. I want to make it a time when I do some great things.” He’s been focusing on his health, working out more than ever, trying to stay sharp and in shape to play the type of meaty leads that eluded him earlier in his career.
“I just want to have a lot of fun with the roles that I’m playing,” Park says.
At least, that’s the 10-year plan. “When I turn 60, the plan is to let it all go,” he says, smirking. “Debauchery. Just drop it all and live very irresponsibly.”