[MUSIC PLAYING] YUL: Simu, welcome
to "Talks at Google." How you doing? SIMU: What's going on, Yul? It's so good to see you. YUL: Yeah, man. Dude, that trailer was
absolutely bonkers. I got to ask you, how many times
have you seen that trailer? Like, do you watch it every
night before you go to bed? SIMU: Oh, man, you're going
to put me on blast right now. YUL: [CHUCKLING] SIMU: I do not watch
it every night. YUL: Oh, I would. SIMU: But the day
that it came out, I probably went through it--
like, I probably blasted through it, like, 150 times. YUL: [CHUCKLING] SIMU: It's just a ballpark. But it's like, it comes out,
and then all of your friends are constantly talking
to you about it. And everyone that
you meet is like, can we watch the
trailer together? So I had to watch it, like-- yeah, I basically had to
watch it over and over again, which was not the worst
thing in the world. YUL: I could think of
worse things to do. SIMU: Definitely, definitely. I hadn't seen it
in a couple days, so yeah, it still
holds up, I got to say. YUL: [LAUGHING] SIMU: I got to say, our
trailer people are top notch. I was on a show called
"Kim's Convenience." We had just had a couple of
seasons of success, so things were looking really good for
my career for the first time, and spent a number of years
kind of in credit card debt, struggling and-- YUL: [LAUGHING] SIMU: [CHUCKLING] --living
the starving artist life. And I had just started
auditioning in the states. I had gone down to LA for maybe
the first time, spent the pilot season down there. And there was just so much
uncertainty going on in my life where I was learning a new city. I was trying to figure
out what my way was. And there's just so much-- even though I was on a show, and
the immediate kind of anxiety of, what is my next
thing going to be. That was taken away. It kind of gave way to this
greater question of, OK, now that I have this kind of,
sort of a toe in the door, how am I going to open
the door, and how am I going to continue to build a
career because that show is going to end someday? And I just, I thought
about my parents and what it must have been
like for them at age 30, 31, coming to Canada
for the first time, going through experiencing
a lot of the same anxiety that I was going through. Except, of course, they
didn't speak the language. They didn't have,
like, a nest egg that they could fall back on. They didn't have
savings of any sort. So it was really just them
in a completely new country left to their own devices. And kind of for
the first time, I started to understand life
from their perspective. I was at rock bottom. I had no job. And I thought, like, I could
either bounce right back, start interviewing again,
get a job somewhere else, probably go through
the same thing. Or I can just take a breather,
do something for myself, something that always
piqued my curiosity. So I was like, well,
I would love to find my way onto a movie set. I had heard about
some friends of mine that had been extras in movies. And I'd always been
so jealous of them. So without any sort of other
way in or anybody to know, I went on Craigslist. And I found an extras
listing for this movie called "Pacific Rim," directed
by Guillermo Del Toro. And that's kind of how the old
legend goes of, found myself on set making minimum wage, fell
in love with the whole thing, and then kind of
resolved to do it every day for the
rest of my life as long as somebody would be
willing to give me a chance. YUL: Yeah. SIMU: And thankfully,
it's been almost 10 years. And I've gotten quite a few
chances, which is great. YUL: Yeah. SIMU: But I'm so sorry. The original question was, how
did my parents react, which is, of course terribly. YUL: [CHUCKLING] SIMU: I actually kind of
kept it from them for as long as I could. But then it got to a
point where I had booked my first national commercial. And it was about
to across country. And I was like, I should
probably let my parents know. So I actually sat them down,
and I came out to them. I told them about
what I was doing and I had lost my
job and everything. And to be fair to them,
I think in the beginning, they were initially
very understanding because they were convinced
that I would drop it after a couple weeks. They were like,
OK, we understand. Like, you're probably
massively depressed from losing your job
at such an early age. YUL: [CHUCKLING] SIMU: You know, he just
needs to do some things. And then he'll kind of get
his head back in the game. And unfortunately,
as time went on, I just kind of
became more and more invested in what I was doing. And that was when my parents
really started to worry. And it got to a point
where we didn't really talk for almost two years
because they felt like I was throwing my life away. And to be fair, I
was walking away from a very, very
expensive education. OK, I'll be frank. The first barrier was that I
didn't know what I was doing. I had literally studied business
and accounting my entire life. And I just kind of made this
decision to try acting out. And it's such that, I think it's
a fallacy that a lot of people have that acting is just,
you know, you show up. You get your makeup done. And you say a bunch
of lines on a page. And to be fair, it is
all of those things. But it's also-- I mean, acting as an art form
kind of goes so much deeper. And I think I was missing
that kind of background. And so I hit a wall pretty early
on where, in my first year, I booked some commercials,
some speaking roles, like, very, very small ones. And I found myself at
the edge of my capability as just kind of a
natural whatever-- actor or a very, very kind
of low level actor. But in order for me to
take the next step, which is to play characters that
had any sort of nuance or any sort of an
arc or progression, I had to get better. So I actually put myself
through a ton of night classes. I took improv at
the Second City. I did everything that I possibly
could with the severance package from Deloitte to-- YUL: [CHUCKLING] SIMU: --put me in a
position to succeed. So that was first and foremost. I had to get my level up. I ticked a lot of boxes because
I was an actor of color. And so that meant that
I got a lot of roles as the Asian guy in a front
group that doesn't really say anything but is kind of in
the background really, and just a little bit of color
but not too much to make the screen a
little bit more diverse. And back in 2012,
2013, that was OK. As I kind of went
on and I started auditioning for
slightly bigger roles, I found that the number of
auditions that I was getting was going down. I was barely booking
anything and barely even being able to go out. And when I did,
it would be like, I would be reading these
pages and being like, well, these aren't
characters that I'm playing. These are like-- you know,
stereotypes isn't even, like, the right word. YUL: Caricatures. SIMU: I'm playing caricatures. I'm playing, like,
you know, emojis. Like, literally, some
of my first roles was, like, just surprised guy. YUL: [LAUGHING] SIMU: So it was like a
step below stereotype. YUL: [LAUGHING] SIMU: Learn to see who you are,
whether it's your ethnicity-- you know, all of the things that
make you you-- your identity. Learn to see that as a
superpower rather than a hindrance because
I've met so many people and spoke to many people
who have said something along the lines of,
Simu, I'm really interested in TV and film. But there's just not that many-- I don't see that
many roles out there for people who look like me. Is it still worth it? Or I'm feeling like I
really want to do this. But I don't think it's a good
idea because the opportunity isn't there. And how I've always
responded to that is, you have to make your own. You have to embody some sort
of an entrepreneurial spirit and learn to see the
lack of representation as an opportunity
rather than a hindrance. And I think in the far future
and in more broad strokes, I think I want to
continue to break down barriers of what people perceive
Asian-Americans as capable of being. And I've been fortunate
enough to kind of be granted a platform
through this amazing movie. It's going to
feature martial arts. That's going to be super cool. But I also don't want
that to define me. I want to be an actor. I want to be somebody
who inhabits roles regardless of what
the requirements are, whether it's martial arts
or jazz piano or crocheting. Like, I want to be able to
disappear into those roles and to portray them and to deal
with material and characters that people haven't seen before. And also, I want
to be able to step into the producer's chair and-- YUL: Yeah. SIMU: --be able to greenlight
projects on my own and amplify other creatives of color-- storytellers,
directors, writers-- who can speak to parts of
the Asian-American experience that I can't and that I can use
my platform in some small way to kind of push their voices
forward and amplify that. [MUSIC PLAYING]
