Meet Kelvin Yu, the master of TV diversity
Actor breaking ground as Asian American ‘hunk’ on Netflix’s Master of None
Kelvin Yu is playing a groundbreaking role for an Asian American male on television: he’s the “hunk” on Aziz Ansari’s Master of None on Netflix.
“I’ve been acting for a long time and as a character I’ve been asked too many times to count to murder my wife out of honour,” Yu laughs. “It’s like, God, I’m murdering my wife again because I guess that’s what Asians do on television. So to actually play a role that is considered mainstream is remarkable.”
Master of None’s second season premiered Friday. It is notable for the kind of diverse, colour-blind casting that is absent from much of conventional TV. It also arrives when Hollywood is having a watershed discussion about race.
One of the last frontiers in the combustible issue is the depiction of Asian men as sexless nerds incapable of having a romantic onscreen relationship.
When Master of None co-creator Alan Yang picked up an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy along with Ansari for Season 1, he reminded viewers that Asian Americans had a long way to go since their legacy was “Long Duk Dong,” the horny teen from Sixteen Candles.
He could have also added Charlie Chan, Arnold from Happy Days and, more recently, the desperately-wanting-to-fit in Han Lee from 2 Broke Girls, or perhaps the doubleddown, hyperkinetic caricature that is Mr. Chow from The Hangover films.
Asians have always been something of a “model minority.” They’ve been less willing to complain historically about issues such as inclusion. However, the hashtag #StarringJohnCho with the Star Trek actor photoshopped on current movie posters became a social movement questioning why there weren’t more Asian men in leading roles.
It’s rare to have an Asian American male represented in Hollywood as a fully rounded person. The Walking Dead’s Steven Yuen as zombie fighter and devoted husband Glenn Rhee was a good start. Daniel Wu’s swordwielding hero of Into The Badlands is a true badass, but he spends less time romancing and more time doing stereotypical martial arts.
On Canadian TV, you have Simu Liu, who plays eldest son Jung on Kim’s Convenience. But the representation remains sparse.
Yu’s and Ansari’s characters are much more illustrative, warts and all, of regular folk who just happen to be Asian and, yes, also have girlfriends.
Master of None features Parks and Recreation’s Ansari as Dev, a New York actor famous for a Go-Gurt commercial (known as Yoplait Tubes in Canada), and his group of friends, including best buddy Brian, played by Yu.
“Our idea with Brian was to make an Asian who is sexually capable like real Asian people,” Ansari tweeted.
But Yu’s path to recognition is emblematic of the state of the industry and the obstacles that actors of colour face.
Before Masters of None, the 38year-old Los Angeles native was probably best known for playing the stereotypical dork Freddy Gong on Ryan Murphy’s WB show Popular.
After a decade in the business, doing honour-killing and nerd boy roles, he felt he had hit a ceiling.
“I remember seeing a poster at a video store for The Proposal with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds and thinking that will never be me. I’m never going to get that. The whole studio system, the business model, the culture works against that. The system is rigged.”
So Yu decided to work behind the scenes. He got himself a job as a writer on the animated show Bob’s Burgers. He would eventually write 23 episodes and become a two-time Emmy-nominated producer on the Fox show about a family that runs a hamburger joint.
“Change has to come from behind the scenes and it has to happen from the storytelling level,” Yu says. “Ev- eryone on Aziz’s show didn’t come up through conventional casting because we couldn’t. If you’re Channing Tatum there are five roles in every film. But for people of colour there are far less. You have to make those roles, instead of the Asian guy who murders the white guy because he was dating my sister role. In my case, this is the first time I’ve been given a part written by a Taiwanese American writer for a Taiwanese American actor.”
( Master of None’s Yang wrote himself into the story by casting Yu to play the role. In Season 2, it’s Ansari’s turn to find romance, this time with a trip to Italy where the 10-episode season plays out like an extended but charmingly off-kilter rom-com.)
Having a voice behind the camera also makes a difference, Yu says. In the writers’ room at Bob’s Burgers, his input makes a difference on matters of race.
“Nobody in the writers’ room is saying everyone should be white. I think writers genuinely try to create a narrative, but they don’t have the insight into some cultures that other people may have. And sometimes you get lazy. So you have to call people out. If a character is African American would they necessarily be doing things that way?”
Yu says change is coming, although not fast enough. The rise of online broadcasters has meant a much more democratic and diverse platform to work in, which bodes well for the future of the medium. Television, with its immediacy and vast array of choice, has also been a much more diverse medium in general to work in than film.
“With online broadcasters there is a direct relationship with the viewer. In regular network broadcasting there’s a third party, which is the advertiser, which means you take less risk,” Yu says.
“Everyone has to check in with the advertiser and you get all these notes from the studio so, in the end, you have the same product that everybody else has that they feel they can market. But this time, with so many outlets, you can go outside that box, and I think it makes television much more a reflection of the world.”