Episode 14: stephen park
Wes Anderson, Spike Lee and the Coen Brothers all dig Stephen Park
DO THE RIGHT THING: Ginny Yang as Kim and Stephen Park as Sonny, 1989.
“I had to learn that dialect. I had to be a character that was perceived as foreign ... I had to overcome my biases against my own internal racism.”
Before he was Sonny the shopkeeper in Do the Right Thing, or Mike Yanagita in Fargo, or Nescaffier in The French Dispatch, Stephen Park was a confused college student.
His father was a doctor. So naturally, Park enrolled in a lot of science classes at Boston University. But it never really clicked.
“After my second year, I was on academic probation,” he says.
After transferring to SUNY Binghamton, he continued to struggle. Just before dropping out of college, his girlfriend suggested he take a semester full of classes he wanted to take, not classes he thought his family expected him to take.
So he signed up for four theater classes: acting, mime, voice, body work. He loved it.
“It didn’t feel like school. I had associated school with pain and torture and things I didn’t like to do,” he says. “It was alien to me to be having fun and enjoying what I was doing.”
In this episode, we talk with Stephen Park about his journey as an actor, how he suggested changes to his character in Do the Right Thing, and much, much more.
— Todd Melby
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you like to listen.
FARGO: Stephen Park preparing for his role as Mike Yanagita, 1995.
THE STEPHEN PARK FILE
Born in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. At age 8, his family moved to Manhattan for his physician father’s job at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. At age 10, the family moved to upstate New York, first to Waverly, then Vestal, a city near Binghamton.
As a kid, he was really into karate, comedy and making Super 8 movies. One of the short films he made was The Ninjas of Southern New York. The title, he says, cracked him up.
In college, he enrolled at Boston University, considered himself pre-med, but failed frequently. After landing on academic probation, he transferred to SUNY Binghamton but didn’t do much better until he started taking theater classes.
After graduating with a theater degree, he started doing stand-up in New York City, and despite considering the scene racist, he stuck with it. He also acted in several production at Pan Asian Repertory Theatre.
Soon, he landed a role as Sonny in Do The Right Thing (1989). That was followed by one season on the sketch comedy show In Living Color (1991-1992).
For the next three decades, he continued working as an actor on stage and screen. Among his best known roles: Mike Yanagita in Fargo (1996), Clive’s Father in A Serious Man (2009), Fuyu in Snowpiercer (2013), and Nescaffier in The French Dispatch (2021).