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Driven So, a Homeland Security agent, a sassy heiress, two spaceship pilots and several hundred gorgeous killer robots walk in to a small cocktail reception..... Hmm, let's start that one again. Grace Park walks in to a small cocktail reception, held on the set of the CBC action-and-intrigue series The Border, and DRIVEN tries to remember that the lovely Ms. Park is not any of the plethora of people she plays on TV. Which is to say: In real life, she is not a recovering addict with a trust fund; she is not a pistol-packing U.S. security officer; she is not a mechanical Cylon infiltrator who mistakenly believes she's human. The 34-year-old actor never actually shot Edward James Olmos point-blank in the chest, nor shared a steamy romantic history with Benjamin Bratt. And lest we forget: tracked a religious cult through the Western wilderness? Had her half-human baby stolen? Been assassinated or experienced reincarnation? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. What Park has done in the past year is co-star on three fairly different television shows, with almost simultaneous shooting schedules: The Border, The Cleaner, and Battlestar Galactica. While that feat of juggling may not seem like much in the face of the above-mentioned fictional trials, it nonetheless saw her shuttling between Los Angeles, Toronto, and her hometown of Vancouver, desperate simply to seize enough sleep to remember whom exactly she was playing on any given tomorrow, never mind which peril they were facing. "I noticed the couple of times I didn't [get enough sleep]," she says, "it was like a baaaaaad accident." Aside from extreme exhaustion, another clear and present danger that Park has thus far managed to avoid is full-time residence in L.A. She explains that she is wary of that city's sometimes claustrophobic entertainment-industry culture. "There are things I do like about Los Angeles, but it's nice to have a break from that, to remember what real life is like," she says. Real life, in this case, is a bucolic space-and-time confluence, "where not everybody knows what awards show is on Friday, and who wore what to which event. ....[Hollywood] is not even a reality, it's a falsehood. It's bizarre." If the actor is not completely comfortable with her profession's social artifice, and not at all like her assorted television personae, then what is she really like? To get an idea, consider the following Grace Parkisms... On how to diplomatically discuss first-draft TV scripts: "The last thing you want to do is say, "What is this shit? Who was writing this? What are you smoking?" On the value of professional management: "I remember the first time I got sent a package [a gift from a Battlestar fan], I was worried that it was a bomb, so I left it in my manager's office. Isn't that horrible?" On appropriate reactions to inane showbiz red-carpet questions like (true story), What do you think about all the girls on 90210? "Uh, whaaa?" And the follow-up, You know, how they're all so skinny thin? "I don't really know what you're talking about, but... if the girls are young, it can always be challenging, growing up in the public eye." And on the, well, kicker, So-and-so died, what do you think about that? "Geez, don't even go there." Who is the real Grace Park, then? That particular identity isn't one that a brief chat at a media event and a half-hour telephone interview can nail down. We can say this much, though: She is a refined and intelligent artist with impressive reserves of energy, keen to put people at their ease and possessing the casual charm to do it. In a word, she is gracious. We also suspect that, in a less formal setting, she'd be some hell to drink beer with.
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