When Daniel Dae Kim was a kid, he loved Superman so much that he injured himself jumping out of a window. The actor, whose resume includes cultural touchstones like Lost, 24, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and now KPop Demon Hunters wanted to be the iconic superhero so much that he he decided to “teach himself how to fly” at six years old by leaping from the window sill of his New York apartment. The adventure left him bloodied to the point that his father had to stitch up Kim’s chin without anaesthetic. “I still carry my homage to Superman to this day,” Kim says, pointing to his chin.
That spirit of adventure is part of what led Kim to his new Prime Video series “Butterfly”– a spy thriller in the mold of J.J. Abrams’s Alias based on the Boom! Studios graphic novels. In the show, both Kim’s character David and his fictional daughter Rebecca (Reina Hardesty) are caught up in a world of covert organizations, high-stakes action, international locations, and lots of family drama.
You can check out some of that action and drama in the exclusive clip below, in which David and Rebecca disarm a group of law enforcement officers.
The father-daughter relationship is what drew Kim to the project. “I thought, well, that is actually something that I'm interested in exploring,” Kim says.”You automatically have emotional stakes when you're talking about family, and I know what it's like to be a dad as well as a son. So it was a really nice entry point into the whole story. Regardless of what country we're in or what race we are, we all know what it feels like to be a parent or a child. And every parent makes mistakes, whether they want to or not.”
Kim, who also has a role in Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, is proud to be riding the K-wave as Korean culture continues to gain international appeal.
“You have visionary directors like Bong Joon Ho who are making incredible cinema, and it's of such a high quality that the world has to take notice,” Kim says. “And I think that's appropriate because it's not just cinema, it's music and beauty and food now. So I feel very fortunate to contribute something to that conversation because I don't think (Butterfly) could have been made even 10 years ago.”
Kim says it was important for him to bring a sense of Koran authenticity to the series. In addition to learning how to make hotteok (a type of Korean pancake) Kim also endured brutal shoots in extreme weather conditions during the show’s South Korea-based production. “If you know anything about Korean weather, you know that it's brutally cold in the winter and stiflingly hot in the summertime. We shot through three seasons. (We were shooting) sometimes (in) minus 10 (degrees). And I had one layer on because we're playing the whole season as if it happens in the spring. So you're seeing me acting and doing my best to pretend like I'm not freezing cold.”
Beyond locations and authentic food, Kim says he hopes the originality of Butterfly resonates with audiences. “There are a lot of things that you haven't seen before in our show like having actors with faces like ours at the center of it. That kind of originality is a sign of progress. I want to see stories personally from all over the world because I want to learn about different cultures. That’s how we create understanding among cultures. Instead of thinking about the world as ‘us versus them,’ the more we can start thinking about a global community, the better off we'll be.”
Butterfly premieres August 13 on Prime Video.
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