The Vancouver Province

Battlestar beauty on The Border

11-9-2008
 

Grace Park will be in front of a hometown crowd tonight at the closing of the Vancouver Asian Film Festival for Tinseltown screenings (7 and 9:30 p.m.) of her Korean-American crime drama West 32nd Street.

Meanwhile, multiple Parks are crowding the small screen. She debuts this week (9 p.m. tomorrow) in the second season of the CBC cop drama The Border, playing a tough-cookie U.S. federal agent, and she just got word that her Los Angeles-filmed series The Cleaner, in which she co-stars alongside Benjamin Bratt as part of a team of hard-case drug counsellors, will be back for a second season. As well, the fourth and final season of the brainy sci-fi hit series Battlestar Galactica was followed by a TV movie that reunited the cast this past September in Vancouver.

All of which is a lot of exposure for the once-shy teen who came out of Vancouver's Magee secondary in 1992. That school has a history of drama excellence -- Carrie Anne Moss and Gil Bellows are among its grads -- but Park wasn't part of that.

"I was never a performer type. I didn't even know what floor the drama department was on," Park says now. "It just intimidated me like crazy. I didn't like being the centre of attention. All that stuff was not my cup of tea."

You can still sense a bit of that in the 34-year-old actress. She takes a few minutes to warm to an interview, and when she does she occasionally turns the tables by asking questions herself.

She joined the high-school choir -- "I never did solos. I was an alto, you just blend in with the harmony there" -- and she played clarinet in the band, but when she graduated she headed to the University of B.C. to study psychology. The path to acting started when her mother suggested that the 18-year-old Grace try modelling to earn spending money. Print ads and runway shows led to TV commercials, and when she left UBC, she headed to Hong Hong for work in commercials, music videos and movies.

In 2000 she won a role on the Vancouver-shot teen drama Edgemont, and after that show's four-year run, Battlestar Galactica put her on the radar of sci-fi fans the world over.

But all the while, the shy kid convinced herself that she wasn't in the spotlight. "I liked being on set," she recalls of the early days shooting TV commercials. "I liked the feeling of being in a group, the idea of a project, a beginning and an end, not a lot of pressure. You get flown to Hawaii for a chewing gum commercial, film for a day. It all kind of blurred."

She can't pinpoint when she started thinking of herself as an actor. "I don't know if I had an 'A-ha!' moment, it didn't work that way. Each new thing was a little carrot or a bread crumb."

When Battlestar hit big, the sci-fi press started calling. She says she was glad most of her early interviews were done by phone. "It was horrible, I just sweated. I wouldn't have wanted to do those in person."

This year was her busiest yet, as filming of Battlestar's last season overlapped with the first weeks of filming on The Cleaner in Los Angeles for the U.S. A&E network, and The Cleaner's last few weeks dovetailed with work on the Battlestar TV movie, set to air next year. Couple that with an October start for her work on The Border in Toronto and "any downtime you thought you had, you were on a plane."

She filmed West 32nd Street in New York two years ago. U.S. actor John Cho plays a lawyer and Park co-stars as the sister of a murder suspect within a milieu of Korean gangsters. "No one in this movie is a goody two-shoes."

The Vancouver festival screening comes amid Park's first breather this year. The Cleaner starts work in its second season in February and The Border is also likely to resume later next year.

Park plans to return to Los Angeles early to spend time with the real drug counsellor on whom Benjamin Bratt's character is based.

"Just to be on his hip for two weeks, go with him to cases," she says. "I want to have a good base, a grounding of the character, what the day-to-day is. Then you can add all the little comebacks, the sassiness."

She'd like to do a big feature, but is thinking about the work,

not the spotlight.

"After experiencing a couple of TV shows, they're fast-paced shoots," she says. "I want not to rush, not just to do the scene in one take. I want to explore some things and for that reason I was thinking I have to do film. I care more about the creative process that we get into together. All the other stuff, the box office numbers, the popularity, that stuff you have no control over."

But first, there's that well-earned break. She plans to kick back with some books and DVDs at the Vancouver apartment she shares with her real-estate developer husband, as well as get out of the city.

"I think I want to go visit the West Coast, go to Tofino," she says. "I need to get my feet on the ground, not in a plane. I would like to just be around things that are breathing and natural, maybe take a crazy dip in the ocean. I almost need to let everything leave me, just decompress naturally."