Caught some of this interview down at Patrol and wanted to post a little of it up here as well.
Q: You said before that you’ve done a lot of sci-fi roles but not really why. I was wondering if you found it as an Asian-American actor that you get less stereotypical roles to play in sci-fi because it’s open, like in [Star Trek] Voyager, where you played an alien. Have you found that to be true in general?Read it in full here.
Kim:Yeah I absolutely believe that. And I credit Gene Roddenberry for that. When he started Star Trek the original series in the late 60’s, his vision of the future was an inclusive one. You know, thankfully producers in the sci-fi genre have picked up on that and I don’t see … I think like so many other things in the original series, his vision has come from intuition like the way our phones work just like the Star Trek communicators and, you know, colorblind casting. I think he deserves a lot of credit for that.
I said the phrase “colorblind casting”; what was so great about Gene Roddenberry and what the rest of sci-fi does … is that grammatically correct? What’s so great about what they do is that it’s not colorblind casting, it’s very color-conscious casting. They have a very strong regard for how their shows and the future should look and that’s more admirable than being colorblind about it.