Is there anyone less likely to pass muster as an android than Justin H Min? The Korean American actor best known for playing a dead person in the wildly successful Netflix show, The Umbrella Academy, has such a lovely, easy charm that he transcends even the sterility of Zoom. Besides, no bot designer could manufacture skin so marshmallow soft, or a smile so dazzling. When Colin Farrell met Min for the first time, he took one long look at him and said simply, “You’re beautiful.” Well, who wouldn’t? “When Colin looks at you he really looks at you,” recalls Min. “I’d never heard those words resonate for me in that way before. I was just, like, ‘Maybe I am beautiful, because Colin Farrell said it.’”
Anyway. Farrell and Min are both beautiful in After Yang, a small, quiet bombshell of a movie in which Min plays the titular character with a soulfulness that is atypical of robots, but thoroughly typical of the film’s director, Kogonada. The first time they met, Min asked how robotic he should make Yang. “And in his very coy, mysterious way he was, like, ‘I’m not sure, you tell me.’ And I was, like, ‘No, you tell me’.” Min grins. “Now I realise that he was being strategic. He wanted it to remain a mystery, even while filming.”
After Yang is Min’s first feature film, a springboard in his nascent career that came at a critical juncture, when Min was in a spiral of anxiety and stasis, not even sure he wanted to act any more. “Things weren’t really moving in my career and in my life,” he recalls. “There was this feeling of angst and dissatisfaction.”
The backstory goes like this: early in 2019, Min booked himself on a flight out of LA, determined to put as many miles as possible between him and his career. A supporting role on a new TV series, The Umbrella Academy, seemed tenuous (it wasn’t, but he didn’t know it at the time), and he had just lost out on a part for a show that he desperately wanted. He was still working part-time jobs, still doing endless auditions. After university, he’d cycled through various media gigs – photography, journalism – only to move on each time. Now he suspected that acting was about to go the same way.
But then he picked up the screenplay for After Yang, and felt his world tilt a little. It wasn’t air turbulence. “My manager had sent me the script and said, ‘This is the best thing I’ve read in a really long time; I know you’re not in the right mental space, but give it a shot.’ I was like, ‘All right, I’m tired of this industry, but I’ll read this.”
Min was familiar with Kogonada’s debut movie, Columbus, and an ardent fan of his concise video essays on cinema, like a supercut of startled and transfixed eyes from the movies of Hitchcock, or a montage of hands spliced together from the films of Robert Bresson. But the screenplay for After Yang touched a different kind of nerve, one that lay buried in Min’s subconscious. Somewhere on the flight he began to cry. “The poor woman next to me asked if I was OK, because I was sobbing,” he says. “It was a truly visceral experience.”
Min had boarded the flight feeling stuck. He disembarked feeling unstuck, and seen. “It’s very easy for Hollywood to see an actor in a particular project and then want to cast him as the exact same character,” he says. “It takes people like Kogonada to look beyond that to see something that we can’t even see in ourselves.”
Watching After Yang really is a moving experience. In it, an English-speaking couple, Jake and Kyra (Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith), purchase Yang to keep company with their adopted Chinese daughter, Mika. Yang is a bit like a walking Alexa with a bowl cut and gorgeous Phillip Lim outfits. But when he malfunctions the family is forced to confront the sudden void in their lives. In the movie’s poignant denouement Mika delivers a eulogy to Yang in Mandarin, a language her adoptive parents do not speak. Kogonada does not provide subtitles, a deliberate gesture that underlines the presumptions of an English-speaking audience that expects to be accommodated. But the speech is there to serve a bigger point: without Yang there is no one left to reflect Mika’s Chinese culture back to her.
What had made reading After Yang so visceral? “I was so moved by the moments of silence,” Min says. “It’s a thing that I think resonates viscerally and very deeply for those of us in the Asian community because so much of our lives are things left unsaid.”
Min is not being metaphorical or cryptic. At school he was a chatterbox and joker, and a champion public speaker. “Every elementary school report card, my teacher would always write, ‘Love Justin, but he talks too much.’” At home, with his parents who spoke only rudimentary English, the chatter was on mute. “A lot of growing up for me was about silence,” he says. “I could barely speak Korean at the time, so whenever we would fight or engage in conversation there was such a large language barrier that it was very difficult for us to communicate. We both knew we wanted to say things and express things, but we just didn’t have the vocabulary or the capacity to do so.”
In his films, Kogonada explores that kind of fracture in subtle and abstract ways. Often background sounds – birdsong, running water, a church bell – will fill the space where others might be tempted to stuff dialogue. His camera is always lingering, waiting for characters to move out of the frame, for the hubbub to die down. He knows that silence speaks volumes.
It wasn’t only Koganada’s use of silence that reduced Min to tears on that flight. It was also Yang’s Zen-like relationship to the world – a counterpoint to Min’s inner turmoil at the time. “I think what really touched me in that moment was this idea of contentment and satisfaction with one’s circumstances,” he says. “It not only reverberated with me, but it reminded me of my parents who emigrated to the States with nothing, had to give up on dreams, hopes and ambitions for the sake of their family, and to do so with joy is something that really moved me.”
It was during high school that Min first began to appreciate that his parents had stories predating his own. He recalls asking his mother what she had done in Korea before moving to the States. Her reply was an epiphany. “She had been studying French, she had hopes of going overseas to study international relations,” Min says. “We often think of our parents so one-dimensionally, as these people who just provide food and shelter for us, and it was in those moments of discovery when I realised, ‘She has wants, desires, yearnings, needs, loves, heartaches, pains, in the same way that I do.’
Min grew up in Cerritos, a so-called Gateway City of Los Angeles, and a rare community in which American Asians are in the majority. “It’s a running joke in Cerritos that the non-Asians try to assimilate into Asian culture,” he says. “You would see the white kids trying to fit in with us, like talking about different Asian foods, or the newest anime or Korean drama, and acting like they were familiar with them.” Always ambitious, he says his brother was given all the natural gifts, but that he had grit. “I felt like I could bootstrap my way into achieving things if I just worked hard enough.” Because his parents both worked, Min and his brother would spend their afternoons in the local library. They never had babysitters. His mother would take a late break from her job at a dry cleaners to pick them up from school and deposit them at the library. Min has been a voracious reader ever since.
Cerritos, says Min, was an idyllic place in which to grow up, and hard to leave. Moving to Ithaca, in upstate New York, to study government and English at Cornell, was jarring. “First, on a very superficial level, just seeing faces around me that didn’t look like me, and then on a deeper level, starting to realise that things that felt very commonplace and ordinary back in my community in Cerritos were suddenly exotic and new and interesting to the students that I encountered. Looking back, I realise it was also exhausting, to constantly have to teach people like, ‘Oh, this is kimchi, and I eat it frequently because it’s what I grew up with and I love it.’”
There was another difference, too. Because he’d grown up in a place where Asian culture was an ideal, Min was largely unfamiliar with the oppressive stereotypes of Asian men that predominate in mainstream entertainment. “I think a lot of Asian men feel undesirable growing up in a white society because they have often been overlooked, romantically speaking,” he says. “It was never a thing that crossed my mind until I got to college, because I had a pretty flourishing dating life growing up. At Cornell, I started to experience that dissonance almost immediately – the ways that women had preconceived notions of Asian men. I’d never encountered that growing up.”
Min chose to study government because he thought he might go into politics. At school he had excelled in simulated debates of the United Nations, often representing North Korea just for the nerve of it, or debating abortion from a pro-choice position to see if he could come out on top (for the record he is an ardent supporter of abortion rights). He now sees that all those debates were actually prep work for acting. “Making speeches and arguing for positions that I didn’t agree with allowed me to have bridges of empathy for people that are dissimilar to me – in the same way that I do all the time as an actor.”
His interest in pursuing a political career curdled at Cornell where Min quickly saw the mismatch between theory and practice. “As clichéd as it sounds, I wanted to make a difference,” he says. “And then I realised it is incredibly difficult to do that because of how the system is set up.” Disheartened, he fell into another career as a photojournalist, largely by happenstance, when his father lent him his old Nikon camera for a summer project working with a nonprofit group in Venezuela. “I ended up taking 500 photos there and I fell in love with it,” he says. Friends encouraged him to take up photography professionally. He travelled to Cambodia to document survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide, and began shooting regularly for Cereal, a travel and style magazine based in Bath. That, too, lost its lustre when the novelty of shooting lobster festivals and boutique distilleries wore thin.
For years, Min’s acting career was a slow burn. He thinks his parents secretly hoped his enthusiasm would wither, like his earlier passions. “I think they thought I would do it for a year and then do something else,” he says. “In retrospect, they were being strategic. They knew that if they were a hard no, I would just lean in harder because I have a slightly rebellious streak.”
Then came The Umbrella Academy. In a television landscape saturated with superheroes, it turns out there was still room for more. Min landed a supporting role as Ben Hargreeves, a ghost visible only to his brother, Klaus, and was then bumped up to a series regular. The show’s popularity exploded – when season three dropped on Netflix in June, it topped the streaming charts. “It’s one in a million,” says Min. “I have so many friends who’ve been on so many shows that unfortunately are not watched or get cancelled after one season.”
“Justin constantly brought details to the scene that would appear at first sight to be challenging and potentially awkward within the context of the narrative,” Stephen Surjik, a director on the series, told me. “But I think without any exaggeration by the time we were shooting the scene it was a part of the fabric of reality, so that I could not separate it from the original form. I’m not sure if one should refer to it as acting or conjuring or magic, but it certainly was exciting to watch.”
The one-two punch of The Umbrella Academy and After Yang have served to highlight Min’s versatility and attract notice of casting agents. New projects include a musical, The Greatest Hits, co-starring Lucy Boynton and directed by Ned Benson, and Shortcomings, based on the 2007 graphic novel by Adrian Tomine. Min plays another Ben – this one in a failing relationship, undermined by his own sexual and racial anxieties. “It’s exactly the type of thing I’ve been searching for, which is to just play a human being, first of all, but, more importantly, someone with a lot of flaws and brokenness,” says Min. (In an email, the director Randall Park described him as “an immense talent, one of my favourite actors ever, and a wonderful human being”.)
In August, Netflix announced that The Umbrella Academy had been renewed for a fourth and final season. Min is sanguine about saying goodbye to his character. “I had my highest highs and my lowest lows on that show and it has been formative to my life and my career,” he says. “So I have to imagine there’s going to be a grieving process.” At the same time, he knows how rare it is to choose the timing of your exit, before an experience sours or becomes creatively stifling. “We’re able to say goodbye on our own terms; so many shows don’t get that opportunity,” he says. “We get to leave on top.”
After Yang is in UK cinemas now and on Sky Cinema
Styling by Bemi Shaw; grooming by Juliana Sergot using Bobbi Brown and Keihl’s; photographer’s assistant Jomile Kazlauskaite; shot at Big Sky
