What, no shaved head? The King of Siam without a shiny dome? Daniel Dae Kim, the co-star of the latest revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I, which won five Oscars, gives a cool polite chuckle and runs his fingers through his shiny, clearly real, shoulder-length tresses. He could not be farther from Yul Brynner, who played the part in a pate. “Oh no, it is actually shaved already. This is a wig.”
Television fans will know Kim as Jin, the enigmatic Asian character in the equally enigmatic drama Lost. The series is on summer hiatus, which allowed the 40-year-old actor to cast around for other work. Instead of Hollywood, he chose the London stage. And not just any old stage, the Albert Hall, directed by Jeremy Sams and starring alongside the ?ber-diva Maria Friedman. Does he realise quite how big the venue is? “We are performing in the round so it will only have a capacity of 3,000.” He seems undaunted by the numbers.
Kim is better-looking off screen, with cheese-grater cheekbones and soft features. He also has a surprisingly deadpan sense of humour that has not been seen in Lost, where he is severe and serious. Of being voted one of the sexiest men of 2005 in People magazine he says with a grin: “Yes, but only for that one year.” He has a penchant for English comedy. “Monty Python, The Holy Grail. The Office ranks among one of my all-time favourite comedies. Brilliantly painful.”
It was his Anglophilia that drew him to London. He is so in love with the theatre that he came here for his honeymoon a decade ago and went to the theatre every night. With his wife, presumably. “I love Jonathan Pryce for his simplicity and Ian McKellen, but Paul Scofield in King Lear is my all-time favourite.”
He rejects the suggestion that playing the testy King who warms to the prim English tutor is a case of celebrity stunt casting: “You can do that in a black-box theatre in front of 50 people, but you can’t do that in front of 3,000 people. For me this is a dream role. There are certain themes that really appeal to me, this notion that the King is trying to bridge two worlds, trying to find the best of Western culture to improve his world. That resonates because as an immigrant I’m trying to find that commonality in my own life.”
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Kim has done his fair share of research, going back to the original memoirs by the teacher Anna Leonowens about her time in the Far East, although, he points out, even those aren’t entirely reliable. Leonowens was apparently not with the King when he died, as she claimed.
“It is a common misconception that the King was bald, for instance; that’s how iconic Yul Brynner is,” Kim says.” The real king was a thin, scholarly monk, so it is liberating to know that Yul’s take doesn’t adhere strictly to the actual person. I don’t know what to be faithful to except to myself.”
Even after half a century Brynner is a tough act to follow. Ben Kingsley had a crack in the 1990s and had fun with the part without redefining it. It is Kim’s first musical but he is undaunted by the singing — he plans to do it properly rather than talk-sing as Brynner did. And it is hardly his first appearance onstage. As the son of South Korean doctors who came to America when he was 1 year old, he was expected to go into law or medicine. He planned to go into finance, but was bitten by the stage bug at college. While his friends went to make their fortunes in business, he did eight years of theatre. “In my parents’ view there were only three jobs in the world — doctor, lawyer and garbage man. When I told them I wanted to be an actor, it was almost the same as being a garbage man.”
Gradually the television roles started to come. Angel, ER and 24 got him noticed and he also appeared in two Star Trek spin-offs, Voyager and Enterprise. He once said controversially that America seems to like its Koreans in sci-fi. It is a remark he only partly withdraws. “It was a bit tongue in cheek, but by and large the most you see them is in space and in the future.” He should not complain too vociferously, he is usually the Korean bagging the parts.
Lost came along in 2004. Jin has been a big enough role to get Kim’s face known, but not so big that he will be typecast in the way Brynner was with the King of Siam. When he first appeared, however, Jin — who rarely speaks English — seemed to be an unsympathetic, overpossessive husband. As a result it caused concern among parts of the Korean community in America who disapproved.
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“I think the great thing about TV is that characters can evolve. Jin has changed a lot. Koreans are proud, and reasonably so, of their culture and protective. I wanted to make sure a negative portrayal was counter-balanced beyond a stereotype.” Gradually he has become a little more heroic and will be back for the final series.
Shooting resumes in Hawaii in August. So come on then, how does Lost end? Is it all a dream? Part of a secret government plot/conspiracy theory/cover-up? “I have a general idea, but our writers are very clever. Whatever I think, they will have come up with something more clever.”
Looking back, does he ever regret not becoming an investment banker like his friends? “A lot of them were retiring with Porsches when they were 30. Of course I questioned it!” However, the ones that stayed on are probably unemployed now. Kim grins at the thought. It will be fascinating to see how this unexpected joker handles being a king.
The King and I is at the Albert Hall, London SW7 (020-7838 3100; www.royalalberthall.com), from Friday to June 28