Interview with Masi Oka - Radio Times, August 2007

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Interview with Masi Oka - Radio Times, August 2007

If you're loving Heroes, you'll be in thrall to the time-bending Hiro. Masi Oka reveals his extraordinary story to Charles Lawrence.

"I am the face of Asian-America right now," says Masi Oka, the Japanese actor who has quite suddenly, and without much fanfare, become the star of American television's number-one primetime hit, Heroes. "I know that. I have been in the right place at the right time."

If you were dealing in cultural clichés you would want to report that the face of Asian-America gives you an inscrutable look as he says this, peering at you through his narrow-rimmed spectacles.

But in fact 32-year-old Oka (who looks more like 25) lays down the fork with which he is eating macaroni cheese for brunch, and laughs, his face suffused with the sense of irony that, perhaps more than anything else, powers the transition from cultural cliché to that new phenomenon, the Asian-American.

No-one had really heard of him until Heroes, a soap-opera action-drama featuring a group of people from all corners of the earth who just happen to have a "superhero" gift. Oka plays Hiro Nakamura, a Tokyo office worker who discovers he can control time.

"Hiro was the last of the characters to be added," says Oka. "He was partly there for comic relief - a big geek. But people can relate to that. I love playing Hiro and my enthusiasm rubs off, and that makes him proud to be who he is. Geeks see themselves as stuck on the outside, but they feel they are meant for something more, and Hiro gives them that."

Rather to the surprise of the writers, producers and fellow actors, it is the geek who has emerged as the hit character.

Masayori Oka was born in Japan to a single mother - Setsuko, a 20-year-old university student from a good family - which is a major cultural taboo. Knowing that her son would be marked for life at home, but seeing his gifts, his mother flouted another layer of Japanese convention and came to California when Masi was six simply to bring him up.

"My mother, who was also in a band, rebelled," says Oka. "And I do not like to be labelled either, to be put in a box. In Japan, it is all about conformity. I love to take risks. Setsuko brought me here so my gifts could flourish - and that was the greatest of gifts."

This mould-breaking woman settled in San Francisco and even supported her son when he followed her example by crashing through another convention. Masi, top of the class in mathematics, refused offers of scholarships to Harvard, Stamford and Boston's MIT. This is to turn down an invitation to become a multimillionaire and run the world.

Instead he went to Brown, a small, but very elite, "liberal arts" college. "I loved it!" he says. "It is all about individuality, finding your own way, looking at everything." Studying pure maths but reading the literary canon and joining the amateur dramatics society, Oka was not even thinking about what to do next when he strolled into a Brown "job fair". He found himself chatting to recruiters from Industrial Light & Magic, the special-effects studio owned by George Lucas of Star Wars fame.

"'Wow!' I thought," says Oka. "'You mean you can make a living creating movies on computers? And work on the new Star Wars series? Whoa!'" He joined. Creating fluid motions became his speciality, and the huge waves that overwhelm George Clooney in The Perfect Storm mark the height of Oka's Lucas career.

"I could have been happy there for the rest of my life," he says. "I love using both the left and right sides of my brain, and that's what I was doing. But I was getting too comfortable. I like to challenge myself."

So Oka got himself transferred from Lucas's San Francisco headquarters to the Los Angeles office and worked part time while setting out to become a professional actor. He gave himself six years for a breakthrough. Time was almost up when his agent called him for the audition for Heroes.

In real life, the only superhuman power Oka covets is the power to tell stories. Full of confidence, he sees himself morphing from Hiro to a few major film roles, and then to directing.

"I want to take advantage of my technical skills, but movie-making is still a human business, and it is all about storytelling," he says. "Storytelling to me is existentialism: to be able to tell the story is to say you exist. The myths, legends, fables, old childhood stories - it is so cool to pass those on!"

This summer, Oka points out with eyes glittering, sees his tenth class reunion at Brown. "I can't wait," he says. "It is going to be so nice to be going back a star! I am so looking forward to seeing all my old crushes, who would not give me the time of day back then. We'll see what they say this time!"

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