From struggling to movie star
Charles Melton took it to heart. The result: ‘Riverdale’ and now ‘Sun Is Also a Star.’
“The Sun Is Also a Star’s” Charles Melton, above, takes Oprah’s words of wisdom to heart.
Five years ago, you could have hired Charles Melton to walk your dog. He was really good at it too — the toprated employee on the Wag app, where he clocked strolls with more than 300 canines in two months. Sometimes he’d get bit, but he always tried to leave a nice review about each dog anyway, seeking a coveted $3 to $7 tip.
“I was walking Jim today, and Jim’s great. He would have been my best friend if we went to college together,” Melton said, recalling the kind of appraisal he’d leave for pet owners. “There’s just one thing about Jim: He took a number two in front of the FedEx.”
It was 2014, and Melton had just moved to L.A. After years of working as a successful model in New York — booking gigs for Dolce & Gabbana, Kenneth Cole and MAC — he’d decided to follow his real passion: acting. But it wasn’t going well.
He’d landed a guest spot on “Glee” and a couple episodes of “American Horror Story,” but the money he’d saved was running out. He was sharing a studio apartment with a dude he’d met on Craigslist. And when he wasn’t walking Fido, he was delivering takeout from Chin Chin in Brentwood.
So he did what many of us do in times of darkness: look to Oprah Winfrey.
“Oprah said something about doing things with purpose — if you’re going to do something, be the best at what you do,” he said. “I couldn’t just hate walking dogs. I had to love doing it, because in my mind, I was thinking, ‘I’ll walk dogs and work Chinese takeout for the rest of my life until the day I die so long as I get to do what I’m passionate about.’ That’s when I realized I was willing to do anything to be an actor.”
And before long, with Winfrey as his guiding force, things turned around. In 2017, he landed his first major part — on the popular CW show “Riverdale.” Overnight, his social media following skyrocketed — he now has 5.6 million followers on Instagram — leading to his becoming a movie star.
Big screen role
Melton makes the jump to the big screen in “The Sun Is Also a Star,” an adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s bestselling young adult novel. The Warner Bros. film, which is now playing nationwide, follows two high school students whose paths cross one fateful day in New York City. Melton’s character, Daniel, spots a beautiful stranger in Penn Station and runs after her, convinced she’s his soulmate. But as it turns out, the pretty girl — Natasha, played by Yara Shahidi (of “black-ish” and the spinoff “Grown-ish”) — has only hours left in the city because her family is on the eve of being deported to their native Jamaica.
When Yoon announced that her teen romance was being turned into a movie, she solicited fans’ suggestions on who should play Daniel, the son of Korean immigrants whose only wish is for him to be an Ivy League-educated doctor. Within hours, Melton had been tagged for the role hundreds of times. Intrigued after learning of the groundswell, the actor bought a copy of the book. By the time the screenplay was finished, he’d voiced his interest to the filmmaking team and asked to put himself on tape for director Ry Russo-Young.
“Before we’d even met, I found an interview of him online saying that ‘The Sun Is Also a Star’ was his favorite book,” the director said. “I think hunger says a lot. That’s not to be undervalued, someone wanting to throw themselves into the part and be passionate — especially for this character.”
Melton, 28, is big on following his gut. In college at Kansas State University — where he was recruited to the football team, starting as a safety on special teams in his second year — he changed his career path because of an ad on the radio. On the way to practice one day, he got sucked in by one of those “Do you want to be a star?” talent pitches. He called the number and booked an audition for something called the Arts Showcase, driving 45 minutes to Salina, Kan., to read for a Twizzlers commercial. He landed a callback, but there was a catch: He’d have to pay $3,000 to attend the showcase in Orlando, Fla.
“I thought, ‘Wow, I made it. I made it,’ ” and then I saw in the fine print that it was $3,000,” Melton said. “So I ended up crying to my parents to let me do this — literally crying, full, real-deal crying. My dad was like, ‘How are you going to pay us back?’ And my mom convinced him.”
Melton was an Army brat, traveling the world for his father’s career. He was born in Alaska, lived in Korea, Germany, Texas and finished high school in Kansas. One of the few constants in life was movies. Every Sunday after church, his dad would take him to see a film. In third grade, after seeing “The Matrix,” he turned to his father and said, “Dad, I want to be in the movies.”
“I remember my dad saying, ‘Charles, if you keep it up with taekwondo and everything, you can be the next Jet Li, Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan,’ ” Melton said. “That was cool to me at the time, but now, looking back, I realize that was his only reference to seeing someone of Asian descent in film.”
Melton’s father was from Oklahoma and describes himself as “all-American trailer-trash white,” according to his son. He met Melton’s mother while he was stationed in South Korea. They married and after crisscrossing the globe settled in the U.S. But the time Melton spent as a kid living on a military base in his mother’s native country was formative, he said.
‘This is America’
His kindergarten teacher asked everyone to bring their favorite candy bar to class. He brought a Baby Ruth, he said. The teacher collected the treats and put them into a pot and melted them together. “She was like, ‘This is America,’ ” he remembered. “And so that became my idea of America: an all-encompassing melting pot of cultures. A country founded on immigrants and people from all walks of life.”
Melton was sitting in a conference room at Warner Bros. last month signing a stack of posters in advance of the release of “The Sun Is Also a Star.” A publicity assistant peeked her head in the door, bearing bottles of a spinach-colored concoction. “Do you like ‘Fifty Shades of Green?’ ” Melton joked. “I got you one just in case.”
“So anyway, I convince my parents to give me the $3,000,” he said, returning to his audition story. “I show up and do a cold read, a monologue, a mock TV commercial, a runway walk. It was like a pageant show, and then you’d open an envelope at the end and see how many callbacks you got from casting directors and agents.”
He got 23 callbacks and won some trophies too — “top actor, top model, whatever” — that he still keeps. He didn’t get an agent, but the encouragement was enough to inspire him to quit football and move to L.A.
But his biggest struggle wouldn’t be sharing a “‘Zoolander’ apartment” with others. In 2018, just as his career was taking off on “Riverdale,” some online sleuths dug up tweets he’d written when he was around 20. And they were bad. “Fat chicks need to understand that wearing yoga pants is a privilege, not a right,” read one of them. He issued a public apology, but it was a bad look — and something he still struggles to address.
“Yeah, that was a — I wish I could take it back,” he said. “The things that I said that were dug up, there’s no excuse for it. I still wish — I know this is something that I’m going to be — I’ll apologize every day for the rest of my life to anybody that I ever offended or anything. I wish I could take it back.”
The issue is particularly sensitive, one might imagine, because Melton’s girlfriend — fellow “Riverdale” star Camila Mendes — has admitted struggling with eating disorders like bulimia. Melton said one of the most difficult moments was when a stranger found his sister’s Instagram account and left comments about his remarks on her page.
He has become much more conscious of what he posts online and says he feels the pressure of serving as a role model for young Asian Americans who are seeing someone like him in a film for the first time.
“It’s good to see Henry Golding doing what he’s doing, it’s good to see Jackie Chan doing what he’s doing. And John Cho and Steven Yeun,” Melton said, citing other Asian actors.
Costar Shahidi said she and Melton often discussed “the grander implications” of “The Sun Is Also a Star” and what it means that two young people of color are starring in a studio romance.
“To be in a movie dealing with romance, the implication is that you are deserved of love,” she said. “We both share gratitude for the time this movie is coming out, being in a space in which we have a ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and a ‘Black Panther’ and a ‘Beale Street’ and ‘Us.’ ”
Because of those trips to the cinema with his dad as a kid, Melton said he’s long hoped to be in this position.
“It was never like, ‘Oh, there needs to be more Asian people on screen.’ It was more like, ‘I can be the first one,’ ” he said. “I loved Ryan Reynolds or Ryan Gosling or Tom Hardy, and I thought, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ ”
His phone rang and he paused, checking it quickly. It was his father, so he asked if it was OK to put the call on speakerphone.
“Hey, Dad, I’m doing an interview with the Los Angeles Times, so I can’t really talk right now,” Melton said.
His father apologized, but not before sharing his pride over his son’s career.
“I feel great about it. He’s always been a romantic,” Melton’s father said. “A real lover and a dreamer.”