Yoson An: How an Auckland ‘nerd’ became a Hollywood heart-throb
Yoson An set international audiences swooning with his turn in Mulan, now he’s about to play his first romantic lead role just in time for Valentine’s Day. Tyson Beckett meets up with the actor home from Hollywood and loving life.
Alot can change in seven years. Back in 2017, while appearing in the short documentary Asian Men Talk About Sex, actor Yoson An lamented that in his industry “you hardly see a rom com where an Asian male is the lead”.
Later this month, on the eve of Valentine's Day, An steps into that role himself. He plays love interest Richard in Five Blind Dates, a Prime Video romantic comedy about a Chinese-Australian tea shop owner who finds the fate of her business and love life lies in one of her next five dates.
It's a whimsical tale about a modern love and what it takes to negotiate generational and cultural expectations of romance. It's the first feature film produced locally by Prime Video in Australia and also An's first foray into capital R Romance.
Traversing different cultures is something An is fairly familiar with himself.
Born in Macau and raised in Auckland, the 31-year-old has been based in Los Angeles for the past three years, acting alongside stars such as Gerard Butler and Kerry Washington.
I’ve sat down to talk with An just before Christmas at Coco's Cantina, the Auckland restaurant that itself has been the backdrop for many a blind date in Tāmaki Makaurau. He's only been back on home soil for a couple of days, here for the holidays, to see family, and renew his visa, and he’s still re-acclimatising.
There's a definite American twang to his voice when he speaks and although he claims to not be jet lagged there are signs he's running in a different time zone. When someone offers to grab him something to eat before our photoshoot he requests sushi, specifically eel, though the clock is yet to strike 10am.
It must feel good, I venture, to be one of the people fronting the change he so wanted to see in the industry. The night before, while conducting some research into An's fanbase, I'd watched on TikTok a series of fancam collage videos made of An in a previous film role: Hong Hui in Mulan. They were, I report back, quite thirsty. Is this the type of public attention something he desired when he got into acting? Not exactly. It's flattering, sure, but also a little awkward.
"I'm not that person," he insists. "I'm a bit of a nerd, you know.
"I still play games, I just like to chill on the couch and play my PlayStation. I write and I love anything fantasy, sci fi, where I can just escape my own imagination. I work out when I need to but I'm not obsessive about it. When there's a project I need to gain weight or gain some muscle for, I'll do it. But in my off season I just chill and drink bubble tea."
That said, An knows there's importance
in the role of heartthrob.
“For decades Asian characters have always just played this trope,” he says. “It wasn't until very recently like Crazy Rich Asians and Squid Games and K-pop, especially with the new generation that, yeah, Asians can be sexy too.”
Actor Xana Tang, who appeared in Mulan and Sydney thriller series Dead Lucky with An describes him as "humble when it comes to his work, and that plays well into how he views and handles his successes”.
"As an artist he’s open to ideas from others, considerate and playful,” says Tang. “He’s also a multi-hyphenated creative. More than just a handsome face, he’s also a strong storyteller who writes, edits and directs. His lack of doubt in his ability to learn new skills is something that all artists should strive for."
Since he was 19, An has been under the tutelage of Auckland-based American acting coach Michael Saccente, who specialises in the Meisner method of acting. The pair share a close bond. An says the coach is "like my Italian father in a weird sense", and Saccente says while he is close with other clients, his relationship with 'his Chinese son' is unique.
"He has grown immensely through the years that I've known him. He comes from a place of kindness all the time."
Saccente thinks it's An's innate spiritual peacefulness that sets him apart in the often turbulent entertainment business. "It's a very edgy business and a competitive business and not always the fairest of businesses. The right person gets the job, it's not always the best person that gets the job."
Saccente admires too An’s ability to keep even-keeled when landing the job doesn't deliver the bread basket you think it will either. Say for instance when the reception to Mulan wasn't as life-changing as everyone hoped - the Niki Caro-directed Disney action film released during the pandemic in 2020 grossed $114 million at the box office against a production budget of $326 million.
"His star was on the rise and the movie was going to be on a different aspect.
It took another course because of Covid when the world shut down," says Saccente. "Where other people, probably including myself, would have lost their mind and went ‘uh there's my shot’, Yoson didn't do that. This is his spirituality, this is who he is at his core. He always seems very grateful and I think that should be a really good lesson for a lot of people. He took it for what it was, not for what it didn't become."
An's first acting flutter came in high school, performing in musicals as a student at St Kentigern College. But it was watching another Antipodean actor on screen that really turned him to the allure of acting.
"It wasn't the musicals. It was actually watching Heath Ledger's performance (as the Joker) in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight," An recalls. "When I saw him transform, I'm like, 'oh my god, he's completely unrecognisable. Like, this is amazing. How can someone just do that?' That planted the seed."
The seed may have been planted then, but it wasn't until some years later, with An at university and not long off completing a joint Bachelor of Commerce and
Science that the shoots of his future career appeared. After doing some student films An took a leap of faith, dropping out to pursue what he loved. It was somewhat of a solo leap. "Parents always want what's best for their kids right?" An says when I ask whether everyone in his life supported his career pivot. "My mum was like ‘you're stupid’, but at the same time supportive."
The appeal of acting for An, then and now, lies in exploration. “It's about getting to dive into a part of myself that I haven't really explored all that much, it teaches me something about myself,” he says.
“True acting I feel, it's not really faking, it's not pretending, it's actually being truthful in a moment and you have to tune into that energy to bring out the truth. You kind of have to go into depth of who that character is and you have to find it in yourself to make it feel true.”
It must have been a deep reach to find that in his next film Shadow Force, set to be released later this year. An plays an assassin in the Joe Carnahan-directed action that also stars Kerry Washington, recent Golden Globe winner Da'Vine Joy Randolph and Method Man. Whereas Five Blind Dates had the appeal of relatability, it's the surreality of the Shadow Force role that caught An's eye.
"I got to explore that kind of the crazy joker side in me a little bit."
That exploratory quest means An's CV is very diverse. Mysteries, action, thrillers, black comedies, An’s done it all. He's not running the risk of being pigeonholed.
"That's a kind way of saying I'm all over the place!" An laughs.
"I'm really liking this run I'm having where I'm not being offered just one thing. I think eventually, maybe if I have a big break from doing one thing really wellI, I may do more of that, but at the moment, I'm fortunate enough to be given these opportunities to test out my range."
With the “much-needed” writers’ strike grinding things to a halt last May, An says 2023 was “a quiet year”.
"Thankfully I've been quite busy the previous year, so I've been able to live off my savings. But the harsh reality of it is that quite a few people I know lost their homes."
Though his workload has meant he’s made frequent working trips home in the past few years, to film parts in Roseanne Liang’s Creamerie and the TV miniseries adaptation of The Luminaries, the fact that there are still more opportunities to act overseas means An isn’t planning on coming home for good anytime soon.
“I think about the famous line of LA ‘let's get lunch, let's catch up soon…’ 20% of the time it actually happens, but if you want to get a project off the ground, if you have the right connections, it can happen very quickly.”
That’s not to suggest An is taking his attention away from New Zealand.“Every time I get back to do a project, I love it. If it means being home I say yes to anything in aheartbeat.“
Kiwi producers,” he says, leaning into my phone which is on the table recording our chat, “please hire me. I'd love to come back”.
Tang is more philosophical about An’s trajectory, saying: “It’s nothing short of difficult being an Asian actor in Aotearoa, because there is no blueprint for you.”
An is in uncharted territory, she says. “There is no other actor from a minority background that has done what Yoson has, in the time that he has, so there is no example.”
It’s no mean feat, says Tang, considering the tall poppy mentality that plagues the industry and country. “It is so fundamentally damaging to any person that is pursuing a life in the creative arts, because the whole point is to share your talent and allow people to see your light and be inspired by it, but here in New Zealand people see the light and they try to dim it or they want to bring it down to a level that they’re comfortable with.”
An points to changemakers like Liang as someone who has reached the type of success overseas he’s aiming for while remaining connected to home. “She created the wonderful web series Flat Three and has gone up to, you know, executive produce and direct Avatar: The Last Airbender and is continuing to create shows in New Zealand to propel Asian stories. I think we need more of that because there's a large Asian population in Auckland, I don't know if you noticed.
“What we watch on screen essentially reflects how we feel about ourselves and if we don't reflect what's accurately in the community, then we just don’t get a full sense of what New Zealand's all about. We are starting to see that shift and I love it.”
As we're packing up to leave, someone on set asks An whether he still wants to get lunch. He can't today, he's got an audition later, but they should for sure catch up soon. "Let's definitely connect," he says.
“It wasn’t until very recently like Crazy Rich Asians and Squid Games and K-pop, especially with the new generation that, yeah, Asians can be sexy too.” Yoson An
Five Blind Dates premières on Prime Video on February 13.