Stephen Park
speaker
139 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Stephen Park’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's so funny because the role was so small and I was on. Yeah, I just felt like I was on there for like such a short, maybe a little bit longer than the pig. I know there's a little pig moment. And I was like, why do they want to talk to me? I'm so nervous because I don't know what to talk about.
It's pretty true. It's pretty true. Oh, my God. That's crazy. I know that actually, I remember when we shot this, 98, that was just like Fargo had just come out recently. Like in 96, I think, so yeah.
Yeah, you stood out to him. You were the one.
Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I mean, I remember thinking, I thought that they might cut it because it didn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the story. And it wasn't until a few years later that it was on Roger Ebert's show. He had Martin Scorsese on. And they were talking about their favorite movies of the 90s. And they brought up Fargo and they played my scene.
And Roger Ebert was describing how Marge Gunderson's character, after she finds out that my character was lying, that kind of sets the light bulb off. And then she goes to speak to Bill Macy's character after she realizes. So it did set off a little bit of a chain reaction, but I didn't know that at the time. The Coen brothers never explained anything to me.
So I really did think, wow, they might cut this.
Oh, my God. It was kind of a long, kind of torturous journey. Because my father, I grew up, my father was a doctor. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I was born in Clinton Hill. And I lived there until about eight. And then we moved two years to Manhattan. And then we moved upstate. We landed in a town called Vestal, which is adjacent to Binghamton. Okay. And so I did most of my growing up there.
So... I first started, when I went to college, I really did not know what I wanted to do with my life. And so I was pursuing medicine because my dad was a doctor. So I thought, okay. But I never had any kind of interest or proclivity towards chemistry or any of these. Which hurts medicine a little bit.
but I was like failing these classes. I mean, just like looking at different like organisms and biology class and like, I can't tell one from the other. So I just felt like this was not for me. And then I ended up transferring to school, which was closer to me, which was SUNY Binghamton. And same thing. I was just signing up for classes. I didn't know what I was doing.
And then I would end up like dropping classes. And so I was kind of ready to drop out. And my girlfriend at the time just said, before you drop out, just, you owe yourself just take one semester of classes. And the only criteria is that they have to be fun, which was such an alien concept to me.
That's great advice. I took an acting class. I took a mind class, a vocal class and a body movement class. And, um, It was to me because, you know, when I was growing up as a kid, I was always like class clown. I was always making super eight movies. Like it was something that I always enjoyed doing, but never considered it a career. So anyway, I ended up getting my, my theater degree and,
And because, you know, I thought that was funny. A lot of people were funny. So I went to New York City and started doing stand-up comedy. And I was doing open mic nights. And then I got involved with theater. I did my first play with Pan-Asian Repertory Theater. And that got me started with basically doing plays. And then, so I came, you know, I was down in New York. I started my career in 1987.
And it was 1988 when I booked my first film, which was Do the Right Thing. And I mean, who knew? I mean, but it wasn't like there were I was at a time when there were kind of a small pool of Asian American actors. So. for the first maybe 10 years, I knew every Asian American actor in both coasts. I mean, we all knew each other.
Um, so it wasn't like there was a big, uh, pool of actors. And anyway, um, uh, then soon after that happened, I moved to Los Angeles and then in living color happened.
Yeah. I heard the audition.
I did. I had an agent. Um, and, uh, I went into the office and I forgot what scene it was, but I remember Spike Lee gave me the part in the room right after the audition. And I was like, because I was already a huge fan of his from She's Gotta Have It. I was in shock. And then I just said, can I hug you? And then he gave me a hug. And yeah, so that was kind of like, that was kind of the beginning.
And I was terrified too, because Being a Korean American growing up in New York, I grew up in white communities, so I didn't grow up speaking the language or anything. And I've had a very maybe tenuous grasp of my culture. So playing an immigrant from Korea terrified me. And so I had to kind of like, my uncle actually worked at a market in Manhattan. So I worked there for a little while.
And my brother-in-law helped me with the dialect because I'd never done a Korean dialect before. And so I was learning the dialect. So anyway, it was kind of a big learning curve for me, just playing an immigrant from Korea. But it was terrifying.
Yeah.
I don't know how it happened. It's just, yeah.
Showing 1–20 of 139 · page 1 of 7
Next →