Ken Leung

Ken: I always let things come to me, I guess. And I've had this belief that if you stay true to why you're doing it, then things will come to you, and I haven't really been interested in pursuing lots and lots of work. I don't really know what that does, other than keep you really busy. I just want to act. And through that, learn what I can about dealing with people and the world. So I don't need to do that as fast as humanly possible, and I don't need to accumulate as many credits as humanly possible. I feel like that's a different goal. If I can act in a sixth floor blackbox in a play that speaks to me that I love, with people who are a good and we connect and can collaborate on something, then that's it. That's what it's about. It's just at some point it gets murky, because you have to make a living, and so you try to kind of balance that. You don't create a plan to deal with murkiness, you just kind of take it as it comes and, like I said, learn from it.

Ken:(On if being a more established actor helps him land parts not written for Asians) I don't know, because I don't know what the people on the other end are thinking. You want to be invited into the room for you, and not what you look like. That's true for anybody for any profession. Not what you look like or what you "represent" or anything like that. But it's hard to say because sometimes you're like, "they just want me so they can add some color to their palette." Or, "they just want me so that they can be diverse in their casting." You don't know.

Ken: (On playing a mutant in "X-Men") That was weird because I wasn't an X-Men fan. I had just come back from Shanghai after Shanghai Kiss, and I actually told Brett that I didn't feel like I was right for it. Brett was just like, "oh just come over," and I was like, "what am I playing?" And he said, "I don't know, we'll figure something out for you." So it was kind of like that. I think the thing with the character's spikes was really because Brett wanted something visual -- he wanted a power he could see. And so I remember spending days and days and days with him in the chair trying to build this prosthetic on me, which ended up changing my face too much, that they ended up going with special effects. But, you know, that wasn't really a part where there was something for me to do -- it was just a lot of posing and looking, I guess, mutant-like. Imagining a bridge falling apart, when there was nothing there. So that was new, and I kind of took it as, "Oh, this is a part of filmmaking that I don't know," and so it's good in that respect. But when I think of roles and experiences on films, X-Men doesn't really register because there wasn't really anything for me to play.