Gracefully Heading Towards a Galactic End
With 'Battlestar Galactica' ending this season, Grace Park has her sights fixed on the future.
It's very alive right now," said Grace Park during a break from Cylons, vipers and raptors.
She's in Vancouver reprising her role as Lt. Sharon "Boomer" Valerii (and all of her Cylon incarnations) for the fourth season of the Sci Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica" - for now at least. As she's checking in with the Pacific Citizen, Hollywood writers teeter on the brink of a strike.
Who knows what's going to happen tomorrow? Production may stop. Cameras may stop rolling - the rumors are running rampant.
But one thing is for sure: this is the last season of "Galactica." Twenty-two episodes are slated and then, no more.
"Certainly going into the final season, the mood was very different. The other day, I walked by the camera truck - the ugliest thing in the world - and I got teary-eyed! It's a different feeling of the past and present coming together," said Park, 33.
"It's kind of a sad sweetness. Like it's your last bite of cake."
'Galactica' Glory
In this last season of the critically acclaimed television show, expect Park's Boomer character to become more involved in the search for Earth while her other robot doppelganger, Athena, struggles with racism. That's the beauty of science fiction: it can be pure superficial entertainment with good-looking robots and it can be a philosophical study of mankind at the same time.
"It's a metaphor for many other things in real life like racism and the war in Iraq," she said about the show.
So when the producers announced this summer that "Galactica" was burning out, the show's legions of loyal fans poured their misery on blogs and online forums like it was the end of life itself.
"Sci fi fans are so passionate when they express how much they like the show," said Park, who is second generation Korean American/Canadian (She was born in Los Angeles, but moved to Vancouver when she was very young. She likes to call herself "North American.")
Park's fans are diverse - they're everyone from women who thank her for being a strong role model to the male fans who have every angle of her body memorized from her various stages of undress on the show. Hey, robots just don't have qualms.
A female fan once sent Park "a massive box" filled with stuffed animals and transcripts of chat room conversations about her "Galactica" characters.
"It was so kind."
She's also gotten CDs and DVDs, but no marriage proposals from prison yet.
But her husband Phil Kim, a businessman, is hardly jealous. When her "Maxim" pictorial began to clog the internet, people asked how he felt about other men salivating over his wife.
"He would always say, 'that's my girl!'" Park laughed. "He's actually more like an actor than me. He has this big personality."
After One Door Closes
"I think I finally realized this weekend that the highest value goes to doing stuff that makes you feel good."
Modeling was fun while it lasted, but she wouldn't want to go back to that. Besides, she only did it for a short time in Asia after her mom said she was pretty enough. But Park comes from a practical family who balked when she divulged her acting aspirations. She said she would try it for a year to see if anyone would hire her.
Now with "Galactica" under her belt, Park is continuing to expand her horizons. She just won a part on an A&E Channel pilot called "The Cleaner," a "stylized drug intervention show about the real life effects of drug abuse" with Benjamin Bratt.
She's also working on a film about crystal meth (working title "Meth") where she plays the sister of an addict.
"It's not a pretty story. It's raw," said Park. "It's like an animal that I just got on the back of and started riding - I don't know where it's going yet."
Park is rounding out her drug oeuvre as Lila Lee in Michael Kang's feature length crime drama "West 32nd" where she plays the sister who gets sucked into New York's Korean underworld.
"She's a good girl, but when you put people in different situations like [Lila] having to save her brother, you'll see how boundaries are crossed," said Park.
In "West 32nd," which is set to open domestically next year and in limited release in Korea starting Nov. 15, Park comes face to face with breakout Korean American actor John Cho who taught her a thing or two about being in the moment.
"He's like water coming down out of a waterfall," she said about Cho's acting method.
And like Cho, she doesn't shirk from the title of being an Asian Pacific American role model.
"The fact is we do something that is beamed into millions of homes and movie theaters. I don't see that as a burden. But at the same time, I don't see myself as some trailblazer clearing a path.
"I feel there's always unlimited opportunity. It's easier now. Maybe there are more opportunities. I hope that it's because eyes are being opened to the rest of the world and people are willing to step outside of their backyards."
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