San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Boogie’ makes Alameda native an instant star
Around the early March premiere of his debut film “Boogie,” Taylor Takahashi had all of his best friends from the Bay Area fly down to Los Angeles. He had rented a house in Hollywood to celebrate, but he needed the people he knew since childhood around to keep him grounded.
“It was more of a celebration for my people than it was necessarily for me,” Takahashi says in a video interview with The Chronicle from his home in Orange County. Rather than get caught in the gears of the Hollywood apparatus, he wanted to remind himself of where he came from — an Alamedaborn and raised kid who never entertained the idea of being an actor.
After all, the origin story behind his leading role is about as unlikely as any star of a major studio film. Takahashi plays the titular character who, as a Chinese American high school basketball star in New York City, fights to create a path to the NBA.
Yet less than a year earlier, the 27yearold was, in fact, working as the assistant for the film’s writerdirector, Eddie Huang, until, just three weeks before shooting began, Takahashi fell into the starring role.
Takahashi had first met Huang — known for his restaurants, travel show and combative involvement in the ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat,” inspired by his autobiography of the same name — in 2017, not long after moving out of the Bay Area to Orange County. Their participation in a recreational basketball league turned into a friendship.
“I (had) watched his Vice show, ‘Huang’s World.’ He was kind of like Mr. Asian America for me,” Takahashi says of
Huang.
At the time, Takahashi was working as a yakitori chef and personal trainer, before Huang, seeing something in him, nudged him into the entertainment industry under the pretense of being Huang’s assistant.
The truth, Takahashi has gathered as of late, was that Huang already had an inkling of Takahashi as the star. “He was Boogie. When I met him, I was like, ‘That’s the kid,’ ” Huang recalls, “because Boogie is a guy (who) doesn’t follow the Asian American path, but in every way, he feels so authentically Asian.”
Reflecting on that revelation,
Takahashi said it was like Huang “being Yoda, and me being a young Jedi.”
“He knew it from the day I walked into that gym, the very first time I met him, that this kid could be Boogie,” Takahashi says.
Takahashi may have seen it, too, without realizing it. The first thing Huang did in their working relationship was send over a script of what became “Boogie.”
“I had no idea what a movie script looked like,” Takahashi says. “I read it, and my notes were probably terrible, but I think my first note to him was just: ‘Damn, this kid is so
much like me.’ ”
That would be an Asian American boy trying to find himself in the world and in basketball. If Takahashi didn’t understand acting, he understood basketball — he remains the alltime leading scorer in the history of Alameda High School.
“I’m not going to say ‘legendary,’ but what he did for that program was tremendous,” says one of his former coaches, Ed Hawkins. During Takahashi’s era at Alameda High, where he went, “the program went with him.”
The fact that Takahashi somehow ended up the star of a studio film “doesn’t surprise me,” Hawkins adds, describing Takahashi as a workaholic. “Taylor has always been that person that always strives for excellence. He’s always pushed himself to be the best.”
Despite light periodic hints from Huang that Takahashi should audition for the starring role, production moved along with a different actor as Boogie. Takahashi instead served as a
“basketball coordinator,” diagramming basketball scenes and training the star. But after creative clashes arose with the original actor, Huang had Takahashi film an impromptu audition tape and persuaded the studio to make a late switch on its lead.
The move did not go over well with Takahashi, who, reluctant and incredulous, clashed with Huang over his sudden turn in the spotlight. Takahashi said he now understands Huang pushed him as a loving mentor would.
Takahashi eventually relented, and within days, he was Boogie, thrust in front of cameras in his first performance.
Unsurprisingly, he relates the experience to basketball.
“It’s kind of the same thing as shooting a free throw or playing in someone else’s home gym and you have a loud crowd — how to silence that out, how to step out of that moment and kind of live in your own world,” he explains.
The result is a performance that has the rawness and rough edges of a nonactor but also in some ways mirrors the shaky defiance of his character.
After the jarring experience of this role, Takahashi is still trying to process what it means in his life.
“It’s weird to start at the top of the mountain and then go down,” he says. “For me, it’s understanding what that journey is like, so I’m taking a couple steps backward.”
After living in Los Angeles briefly, he moved to Orange County, appreciating the quiet more. He now has a management team and is open, but not beholden, to the possibilities of a career in entertainment.
“I’m not trying to play a numbers game. I’m not sitting here being like, ‘Damn, if this doesn’t hit, my life is over,’ ” Takahashi says.
In the meantime, he’s simply soaking up the surreality of the moment.
“I’m very happy, I’m very proud,” he says. “I don’t read reviews on stuff. I’m just kind of in my world and in my bubble, just living life and seeing what’s going to come next.”