By Michelle Woo
Photographs by Eric Sueyoshi
On the proverbial road to stardom, Aaron Yoo is riding in the fast lane. A quick glance at his scheduleshows appearances at screenings in Tokyo, red carpet interviews at the MTV Movie Awards, a string of promotional photo shoots, and, of course, all those after parties. And that’s just this week.
Fortunately, KoreAm was able to squeeze into the lineup after some back-and-forth with his people, who finally told him where to be and when to be there.
“Yeah, it’s obnoxious,” Yoo says, sitting outside a natural foods market in Los Angeles. “There are, like, 10 people on the e-mail list [that sends me my schedule] — agents, assistants, my manager, my publicist. I’m exhausted. I have no personal life. But I have to remind myself, ‘No, you can’t be tired. This is the stuff you dreamed about as a kid.’”
It’s been a dizzying year for the 27-year-old rising celeb, recently called “the most famous actor you’ve never heard of” by E! Online. He’s splashing his mark on the silver screen, playing the hormone-charged Ronnie in the hit thriller “Disturbia” and the saxophone-blowing Lyle in “American Pastime,” a home video release about a wartime family that is uprooted to a Japanese internment camp. Next up: key roles in the coming-of-age comedy “Rocket Science” (releases Aug. 10) and “21” (out next year, starring Kevin Spacey and Kate Bosworth), which tells the story of the real MIT card-counting crew that hustled Las Vegas for millions.
And he’s not stopping yet.
Wearing a long-sleeve printed T, his hair swept and tousled in all directions, Yoo chatters away about his work, his beginnings and his life in tinsel town. He’s an elaborate storyteller, which makes his interviewer a bit antsy since the minutes before he must jet off to his next gig are quickly ticking away.
But the man’s got so much candor and spunk that, ultimately, you can’t help but turn your watch the other direction and just listen.
Rarely stopping to take a bite out of his sandwich, Yoo talks animatedly about growing up in East Brunswick, N.J. At a young age, his parents encouraged him to pursue a career in medicine or business, but even then, Yoo had a mind of his own.
“I wanted to be an archeologist, an astronaut, a f-cking cowboy,” Yoo says. “Everything I wanted to be was purely defined by the last movie I saw.”
In the fifth grade, Yoo was put in his school’s gifted program, TAG (“I don’t know what the hell that meant, but I got to get out of class and move shapes around.”) For one project, he and his friends created a movie — a “‘Star Wars’ epic disastrous mess,” he says.
“We turned my entire basement into a spaceship with markers and paint,” he recalls. “My parents flipped out.”
But the experience fueled his passion for film.
It wasn’t until college that Yoo really explored acting as a career. He majored in theater, English and history at the University of Pennsylvania.
After college, he moved to New York and performed in a number of off-Broadway plays. Reviewers often described the young actor as raw, but promising. For Yoo, that wasn’t good enough. He threw himself into his work, sharpening his voice and expressions. Improving his craft was a “driving addiction,” he says.
In the meantime, with a depleting bank account, Yoo says he was literally living the life of a starving actor. His mother was concerned. When she called one day to probe about his future in acting, he interrupted her and asked if she was telling him to quit.
In a defeated tone, his mother replied, “Have you ever listened to me before?”
Eventually, Yoo moved to Los Angeles, where luck has been on his side. One afternoon in 2005, while sitting on a bench in an L.A. production office, “American Pastime” producer Tom Gorai walked by, took a brief look at him and asked if he was Japanese. When Yoo told him no, Gorai asked another question: “Can you act?”
Cast as the film’s star, Yoo spent two months in the blazing Utah desert. Set designers recreated the Topaz internment camp, where the U.S. government placed more than 8,000 Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Playing Lyle, a young pitcher who was forced to throw away his college baseball scholarship when his family was dumped in Topaz, Yoo says the harsh filming conditions made his performance all the more genuine.
“You can read books and watch interviews with the internees to see what it was like,” Yoo says. “But when you go out into the desert and it’s 110 degrees, you’re just in it. You don’t have to fake it. Sometimes, I would just think, ‘I’m miserable. I’m hot and hungry and tired.’ But at the end of the day, I got to go to the Hilton. The [internees] had to stay there endlessly. That just gives you a different perspective. You can’t even fathom how they lived such a noble existence.
“People have this idea that the big thing is getting the job. That never compares to actually doing it. You throw yourself, your life, your sleep out the window.”
“American Pastime” director Desmond Nakano admired Yoo’s dedication to the project.
“Whenever I saw him, he was working on his fingering on the saxophone,” Nakano says. “He had so much energy and so many ideas. He was constantly trying new stuff.”
Yoo says he has entered the film industry at a good time. He credits Korean American actors such as John Cho and Leonardo Nam (who plays Yoo’s brother in “American Pastime”) for breaking down barriers. All of Yoo’s roles, thus far, have been far from stereotypical.
His parents have learned to accept his career choice. His father, a minister, now sends out mass e-mails to all the other Korean church leaders he knows, urging them to ask their congregations to support his son’s movies.
Today, Yoo refuses to take his fortune for granted, saying that in Hollywood, anything can happen.
Still, before our time is up and he must zip off to another event, he takes a moment to bask in the sun.
“I don’t know what the next six months or the next two weeks are going to be like, so with everything I do, I ask myself, ‘If this were to be the end, would you be proud?’” Yoo says. “But for now, this is unbelievable. I’m so blessed. I’m also terribly exhausted. But, hey, you know, no complaints.”
