Justin H. Min, Travel Writer? The Path Not Taken for a Rising Star

Five years after Justin H. Min started pursuing performing by Googling “how to pursue acting,” he thought he was getting the hold of it. He had made a viral industrial, and he was in competition for 3 main roles.

He landed none of them.

“I was not nervous and I did everything I wanted to,” Min recalled of the auditions. “And that’s the most devastating because you’re like, ‘I guess I just don’t have it.’”

It was on this less-than-healthy head area that Min determined to pivot to a distinct unstable occupation: journey writing. He had caught on with a British journal and it appeared he would possibly cobble collectively full-time work as a contract author if he acquired on a airplane to London.

So Min informed his supervisor he was transferring. But relatively than beg him to remain (as Min had secretly hoped), the supervisor gave his full blessing. Before Min might head for the airport, although, a fellow actor urged him to rethink — well timed encouragement that set Min, now 34, on the trail to “a star-making performance,” as a critic for The Times put it, within the new comedy “Shortcomings,” in addition to fan-favorite turns within the Netflix collection “Beef” and “The Umbrella Academy.”

“This sounds absurd, but I don’t think I’ve really ever struggled with failure until I started to pursue acting,” Min mentioned in a prestrike interview. “So I will absolutely savor this.”

INDEED, EVERYTHING IN the primary 20-ish years of Min’s life had come to him with relative ease. He concedes this solely very sheepishly and with many disclaimers about how lucky he feels.

In Cerritos, Calif., the predominantly Asian suburb the place he grew up, Min felt little sense of distinction. He discovered that the majority success was attainable by way of software. Min was class president all 4 years of highschool and elected king of the winter formal. He was so good in speech and debate competitions that he gained 1000’s of {dollars} in prize cash that helped pay for a Cornell training. Given his items, he thought he would possibly turn into a lawyer — or possibly a politician.

But on the day Min was to graduate from faculty, he woke as much as 9 missed calls. His grandfather, who had flown in for the event, had died that morning. And so Min’s graduation stroll led to a teary embrace together with his household.

The dying of Min’s grandfather pushed him to replicate throughout a solo, cross-country street journey again residence to Cerritos.

“What do I really want to do?” Min recalled asking himself. Life was fleeting, he now understood. Becoming a lawyer or a politician simply didn’t really feel proper anymore. He favored public talking, writing and storytelling. And again underneath his dad and mom’ roof, he was close to Los Angeles anyway. He determined to offer performing a shot.

He quickly found, nonetheless, how laborious the enterprise of performing actually was and that making use of himself wouldn’t be sufficient.

When he bumped into faculty mates they usually requested about his performing profession, “I remember feeling so shattered and so lost in terms of what to say or how to present myself because I no longer could stand on accomplishments,” he mentioned. “I didn’t have that anymore.”

IT WAS SLOW going at first. Min dove into Reddit threads, took courses, looked for brokers and found Wong Fu Productions, a content material firm run by younger Asian Americans that will turn into a preferred a part of Asian American media as YouTube blossomed within the 2010s. The guys operating it requested Min to audition for what he mentioned they referred to as a “narrative thing, but like branded content.”

The “narrative thing” was primarily an eight-minute commercial for a Simplehuman trash can. But it was constructed round an exploration of adulting, and the video acquired tens of tens of millions of views.

That work didn’t pay a lot, and Min started to dabble in journalism as a facet hustle. He was an excellent author and his pictures, like most issues in his life, had drawn reward.

He traveled to Mexico City to interview the chef Enrique Olvera at Pujol; and to Chicago to choose the mind of Grant Achatz at Alinea. What was to not like about work journeys to 2 of the world’s most acclaimed eating places?

Which helps clarify why Min was keen to offer writing a full go when he acquired these back-to-back-to-back performing rejections. But as he contemplated his subsequent transfer, Min had dinner with a buddy, the actress Amy Okuda. She tapped the brakes on his journey plans.

“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” Okuda mentioned in a prestrike interview. So she despatched a word about Min to her personal supervisor, Joshua Pasch, who acquired in contact with him virtually instantly; Pasch even had Min submit an audition tape for “The Umbrella Academy” earlier than the pair met.

“The rest is history,” Pasch mentioned. “He was on the show a month later.”

MIN HAD LANDED THE ROLE of Ben Hargreeves on what would turn into a success for Netflix. His half was modest at first — a lifeless brother in a superhuman sibling squad who sometimes exhibits up as a ghostlike determine that solely the drug-addled sibling, Klaus, can see. The character had little or no display screen time, and Min was not a collection common initially.

But Ben grew to become surprisingly well-liked in Min’s arms. Steve Blackman, the showrunner, got here up with a solution to increase the function and even convey Ben again to life as a distinct, meaner model of himself in later seasons.

“The character of Ben doesn’t really exist that much in the graphic novel” on which “Umbrella Academy” relies, Blackman mentioned. “I wrote Ben in to be someone that Klaus could talk to and only Klaus could see.”

But, he added, “the minute Justin embodied the character, I’m like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do so much more.’”

“The Umbrella Academy,” which premiered in 2019, was an “I made it” second for Min. But he would additionally earn acclaim two years later for his considerate, honest portrayal of the titular robotic in “After Yang,” a quiet sci-fi drama starring Colin Farrell.

“He had such a rich life before he became an actor,” Kogonada, who directed “After Yang,” mentioned of Min. “Like all the great actors, he is consumed with his craft. But I feel like I’m getting to know him better through the different roles that he plays.”

Then got here “Beef,” and the a part of Edwin, an irritatingly excellent chief of a Korean church.

Lee Sung Jin, the director of “Beef,” was finest mates with Min’s brother, Jason, in faculty. Lee mentioned in an interview that he had referred to as Jason Min, an admired reward chief, into the writers’ room to assist craft the character of Edwin. It was a task Lee mentioned he had all the time supposed for Justin to fill.

Both Min and Lee recalled being in Las Vegas years earlier for Jason’s bachelor social gathering and promising one another that they had been going to make it in Hollywood, and that they might work collectively after they did.

“Drunk confidence,” Lee mentioned.

NOW MIN IS PLAYING one other Ben. This one, the principle character in “Shortcomings,” will not be a ghost however a really flawed would-be filmmaker who, within the phrases of a girlfriend, is brimming with “anger, depression, your weird self-hatred issues and just the relentless negativity.”

Min “is probably the only person who could have played him in the way that he did, with such nuance,” Ally Maki, who performs the girlfriend, Miko, mentioned in a prestrike interview.

Min recalled studying the script and saying to himself: “I understand this guy because I was this guy” and “parts of me are still this guy.”

When he initially learn the primary scene — wherein Ben complains a few “Crazy Rich Asians”-style film that everybody else favored — Min mentioned the phrases felt pure tumbling out of his mouth.

Ben is coping with the hole between his elevated tastes and his lack of profession success, he mentioned, “and that disparity is crippling. I remember when I started off in this business, I felt the same disparity. I felt such a chasm between the projects I was doing and the projects that I wanted to do.”

“It results in a lot of dissatisfaction. It results in a lot of cynicism,” he continued, recalling how, at one level, “I sort of prided myself in being sort of this funny, cynical, dry kind of guy the way that Ben is. And then through many years of therapy, I realized that that was simply a defense mechanism for me to hide and shield myself from the actual pain of feeling like I had failed at this industry that I so wanted to succeed in.”

Min holds onto one explicit reminiscence from the film. Ben is sprinting by way of the West Village — that traditional film second when the hero tries to salvage the connection earlier than it’s gone perpetually. In the midst of the scene, he thought, “This is crazy that I am in New York in the middle of this busy West Village street, running as the lead of this movie,” he mentioned. And he remembered how a few of his favourite films had iconic operating photographs. “I never thought that I was going to be the guy who was running.”