e GRACE PARK ONLINE e

Korean-Canadian actress Grace Park likes to keep things interesting. She got her start playing a teenage lesbian Christian in Canada, jumped into the international spotlight as a humanoid Cylon on Battlestar Galactica; and currently stars in A&E’s The Cleaner, a drama now in its second season about an unconventional team that gets addicts to hit rock bottom by any means necessary.

AfterEllen.com talked to Park about some of the extreme sports she enjoys, her very different acting roles, whether her race has been a barrier in her career, and working with The L Word's Mia Kirshner for this week's episode of The Cleaner.

AfterEllen.com: You’ve been known to get into some extreme sports. What extreme sports are you into?

Grace Park: Nothing too extreme anymore. I like shark baiting and I’ll cut down some trees, but while you’re on them and you slide to the bottom before it falls. (beat) I’m kidding!! [huge laughter]

AE: I thought you were serious. I was ready to say ‘Wow! That’s really extreme!’

GP: It really was more like snowboarding, mountain biking, rock climbing and outdoor activities. Back then, though, any word with X in it was cool.

AE: But now I have this image stuck in my head of you wrapped around a tree!

AE: You made the Maxim Hot 100 in 2006 and last year’s AfterEllen’s annual Hot 100 list, so you obviously appeal to both straight men and queer women.

AE: Why do you think you and the characters you play appeal to lesbian and bi audiences?

GP: I’m not actually sure which character that means but in terms of Sharon [on Battlestar Galactica] and Akani, I think they both have different strengths about them. Sharon is strong, yet vulnerable and conflicted and a lot of people are going to connect with that.

With Akani, she has more of a stronger sexuality, I think a stronger presence and she has stuff going on beneath the surface that she doesn’t want to reveal because it’s private and I think that’s also very relatable. I don’t know. I’ll have to start my own poll. [laughs]

AE: You have some really terrific scenes with Mia Kirshner on The Cleaner. Can you talk about working with her and the connection your two characters have?

GP: It was so wonderful working with Mia and the episode was a lot of fun. As an actor, it’s always fun to be able to play a character that you love and then also really get down and dirty with someone else…emotionally, I mean.

Especially with The Cleaner, we have Mia Kirshner’s character, who is a strung out rock star and having to get her clean against her will so that’s a big obstacle there. It all went pretty great.

I think Mia is originally from Canada and she’s been in LA for a little bit and we have a great connection. It was really fun to butt heads with each other. As we were working, it was interesting because when she’d show up, we were shooting backwards. We shot the very last piece first so we talked about how she should play that and the character’s recovery process of that episode. And then we shot the detox stuff and the stuff you see in the episode first when she’s in her pad and she’s not giving a s--t about stuff.

Mia was a little apprehensive about making this rock star a cliché and I reminded her where we’d already gone with her when we saw her vulnerable so then just take it further so we could create a dramatic arc for her.

As soon as we had those discussion, the next day she just had a full-on tantrum take after take after take. It was so much fun to do with her. She kept bringing more and more to it.

AE: Akani is such a great character but we’ve only gotten bits and pieces of who she really is. Do you know her full back story?

GP: It’s not all been revealed to us, the actors. We haven’t gotten a series bible for this show. It seems that the way this show is run we don’t necessarily have a lot of pow-wows about where our character is going. We usually grab the writer on his way to lunch and grill them on what’s happening. Of course, things can always change so we really have to come up with a back story on our own and I think the more we get to do with that the more comfortable that we are.

My back story is that Akani was kind of from Texas and she came to LA, that kind of thing. I kind of go through different cycles. When we went to pilot, I wrote a lot of stuff for her.

Then, the first season, I had some other ideas that I kind of worked on with a coach two or three times and he was going really deep with Akani. I tried to play it in the next episode and I fell flat on my face. It might have worked well for a heavy drama but these characters don’t always wear their heart on their sleeve, especially Akani.

AE: You played a teenage lesbian in the Canadian series Edgemont from 2001 to 2005. At the time your character was dealing with homosexuality and Christianity, what kind of reaction did you get from family and friends?

GP: I don’t know if I got that much of a reaction. I didn’t necessarily go around yelling and telling everyone, “Hey, I’m playing a Christian lesbian, what do you guys think?” I was sort of feeling out what was going on because the lesbian thing was not presented at the beginning. It was just written in. It was never part of her character description and then she had this quick flashback with Kristin Kreuk when at the time I was like, ‘What was that?’

And it was kind of perfect because that’s what Shannon would have been going through. She would probably have just had that thought at that moment and then thought later, ‘What does that mean?’ or ‘Why did I just do that?’

So I think it was quite apropos in many ways and testing the waters and walking out into this new area both as an actor and figuring out my way with the character.

AE: What did you learn from the experience playing the role of Shannon?

GP: It laid the ground work for doing a series. I knew the general process of the day of being a part of a rather large production as well as the priority of work. You don’t necessarily say “Oh, I was going to get my teeth cleaned.” And I learned how to mess with them.

There was one time they let me go off on the weekend and I called them and my call time was at 10am and I called them at quarter till 10 and I totally apologized because I was still at LAX and I missed my flight and there was nothing I could do about it. But I was actually outside the production office door in Vancouver and I stood outside the door and heard the producer totally go off and say ‘I knew I shouldn’t have let her go down!’ That’s when I tapped her on the shoulder. [laughs]

AE: Going from Edgemont to Battlestar Galactica, how was that transition, especially when Battlestar blew up the way it did.

GP: Battlestar was really wonderful because it was kind of a satellite project in a way. We got to film it in Vancouver, the network was in New York, the studio was in LA but we were really off on our own shooting and that was perfect for the show because we were in space looking for a remote planet so it matched the story and what we were doing.

We were on our own, figuring things out as much as we could, getting orders over the phone, there were so many parallels.

The other thing is that we also finished shooting right before we went to air so on Tuesday morning everyone would be asking about the ratings and it totally weirds you out. Ratings? We’re talking about war and death and love and torture and you want to know was it a 2.3 or what? That totally threw me off.

When I’m in LA and that’s what happened when first episode aired, everyone was running around and I was like “What’s going on?” the producers came in and talked to us about it and I was like “Can we get back to work now?”

Maybe I’m just a little more pragmatic and that can be fun but, depending on what you’re shooting and I must have really wanted to shoot that scene because it was fun or something.

AE: Are you enjoying playing a human after playing the humanoid Cylon Number Eight on Battlestar Galactica?

GP: Yes, I am playing human! It gets a little boring. I’m kidding…it’s funny, there was a line that we had on the show this year. We were looking for some girl on Craigslist and she was saying something like "stray dogs, used toasters and washed up crack hos."

I was like "Toasters? What? I want to see that!" It was my old character kicking in.

GP: I haven’t found that at all but it wasn’t like when I turned 20, I turned Asian. It’s not like Cinderella.

I found that I didn’t realize some of my beliefs until I went to another country. I went to Hong Kong for a year and was in a fashion show and I’d say 80% of the girls where Chinese. I thought, “That’s weird!” I was so used to being the token Asian. There was this realization that I was in the majority, after I hadn’t realized I was the minority. I know that that is a perspective for a lot of different people whether you’re gay or Jewish or Asian. It could be anything.

There are so many ways to identify yourself with a smaller group and it also gives you a sense of togetherness, but it actually can give you a sense of distance and separation depending on how you see it.

I don’t find it for myself but I certainly have noticed there’s a lot more exposure of Asians now. I was looking through Oprah’s magazine about a year ago and after the fourth ad of an Asian person, I had to put it down. [laughs] "What is going on here? This is really weird!"

Then I realized that four is a phenomenal amount, and that was just the first half of the magazine.

AE: And if Oprah’s doing it, everyone else will follow!

GP: Exactly! If Oprah’s doing it…

The Cleaner airs Tuesday nights on A&E