SPOTLIGHT: the many faces of Clyde Kusatsu

Clyde Kusatsu may not be a household name, but if you’re anywhere near the Asian American acting world, or if you’re in the company of working Hollywood actors, then you know who he is. Clyde earned his first television credit in 1974 as a parking attendant on the very popular show Ironside. EVERY MONTH WE WILL SPOTLIGHT AN UPCOMING ASIAN AMERICAN SUBJECT
Clyde Kusatsu may not be a household name, but if you’re anywhere near the Asian American acting world, or if you’re in the company of working Hollywood actors, then you know who he is. Clyde earned his first television credit in 1974 as a parking attendant on the very popular show Ironside. Since then, he’s gathered over 180 credits, including Kung Fu; Hawaii 5-0; All in the Family; Magnum PI; M*A*S*H; Star Trek: The Next Generation; the first Asian-American sitcom All-American Girl; Paradise Road; Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story; In the Line of Fire; and American Pie. Currently, he can be seen as the resident obgyn on The Young and the Restless, and in the upcoming Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. As an actor myself, I have long watched and admired his work. Clyde has not only paved the way for the Asian-American actors that followed him, he also sets a standard by which we (as actors) can measure our work.

Clyde was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii and attended the Iolani School. He began acting in summer stock, and after studying theater at Northwestern University, he came to Los Angeles to begin his acting career. Clyde is married to Gayle Kusatsu and has two sons, Kevin and Andrew. In this exclusive interview, Clyde talks frankly about that state of the industry for Asian-American actors, the hard lessons learned in experience, and the challenges facing younger Asian-American actors trying to make their mark on the industry.

ASIANCE: So Clyde, what have you been up to?

Clyde: What have I been up to? Uh, my son said, “Dad, did you realize that you are in the trailer for Harold and Kumar Escape to Guantanamo Bay, or Harold & Kumar 2, the sequel?” I play Harold’s dad.

ASIANCE: Oh, yeah, that’s great. Congratulations!

Clyde: It’s one of those kinda things, I think a lot of times people will say, “What?!?” [Meaning, “Why would you do that kind of movie?”]. And you go, “No, no, no, the zeitgeist is, you wanna get into where the youth see you.”

You know, years ago, I did this thing called East Grand Falls, it was like a little comedy type of thing, I was an English teacher, and [afterwards] I didn’t hear anything about it. Parallel to that people were talking about this thing called American Pie, and someone said, “Dude, you’re in America Pie!”. So it turned out that this little unknown thing called East Grand Falls was actually American Pie, and all of a sudden, my kid, at that time he was in his early 20s, he was like, “Wow, you’re in American Pie?”

ASIANCE: You got some respect!

Clyde: Yeah, got some respect, got some street cred, sorta like, American Pie is cred, so a lot of times you do it for those kinds of things.

I think that today in the [entertainment] business, I don’t think that you can be that picky and choosy, especially if you are an Asian-American actor, or an Asian actor or an actor of color. There are certain things, it’s about getting seen these days. A lot of times [as an actor] you’ve got no control. You think you can plot everything out, but there’s a saying that, if you wanna make God laugh, you tell him your plans.

What I say to people, and when we talk, if you’re a surfer, you like to surf, so you adapt, from the long board to the medium size board, to the short board, and back and forth, but whatever it is, you get to surf. Likewise, if you’re an actor, you have to adapt, and if a project comes along, you get to act. And these days its like, well, it’s an ultra low budget project, but you never know where it’s gonna go. For example, I just did a recent project called Broken Angel. There was this one guy who was a series regular on The Shield. So I said, “So they just called you?” And he said, “No, no, no, I had to audition too!” And I was like, ” you had to audition too?” What we didn’t realize was that basically, it has a film with a Turkish background, about a girl from turkey, and really, their market was not the United States, their plan was to release it in Turkey or Germany or wherever there was a sizeable Turkish population, and the plan was to submit it [for the Academy Awards] as the entry for the foreign film from Turkey for next year.

And then the producer said, “if you ever get to Istanbul, they’ll treat you like, great!” And I said “Why?” And his answer was, “Because they see The Young and the Restless, it’s on prime time in Turkey.” I’ve been playing the resident obgyn doctor on the Young and Restless, that is, until the [writer’s] strike.

ASIANCE: A lot of actors say that they don’t want to work on a soap opera. Did you enjoy working on The Young and the Restless?

Clyde: That in itself was an interesting experience, doing soap operas, because there’s no time. The budget says you have time for one blocking rehearsal. There’s no time for working with the other actors to get the lines right, or whatever, especially if you’re a doctor in a scene, and you’re talking to three other people. So [when you’re preparing in your dressing room] you say to yourself, “There’s four cameras, I know the basic blocking is that you’re in the middle, so camera one and camera two are gonna be on this actress, and camera three is gonna be on that actor, and then they’re gonna search for your close up”. In the meantime, they’re not gonna stop [and make all this clear to you]. So, you’re gonna have to say to yourself, “Okay at this point, I take the stethoscope out of my ears, and I start to wrap up the blood pressure monitor and put it in my bag, and when I turn to my right, I can and do my dialogue there [for the close up, where the camera can see me doing my line].

So what I’m doing is blocking it and directing myself, so when I’m called to the floor [from the dressing room] to shoot the scene, they’ll go “Action!” They might say, “Do this line again” or maybe, “How is it?” And then you’ll hear, “Clear, moving on!” because that’s all they have time for. It’s like a factory, and you have to look at it that way.

ASIANCE: It’s a business, and as you said, the actor have very little control over that.

Clyde:It’s about production, but you do have some control, and your responsibility as an actor is your performance. For example, I use this analogy: if you’re a pro football player, and you get cut, and you need to audition for other teams, well, to keep yourself viable, you gotta learn the different playbooks, you gotta be able to adjust to the grounds and the different fields, the different count, cause basically you’re gonna have to adapt to whatever the situation is. So as an actor, you can’t wait for somebody [to tell you what to do]. You prep the audition, you go in knowing in your mind what it is you want to do, you assume that they’re not gonna tell you what it is, you can’t depend on that. So the one thing you can control is your performance. If they wanna tweak it, they’ll tweak it.

Take a look at Eisenstein, who was this Russian filmmaker back in the 20s, he said, learn the concept of montage, meaning he would take an actor and say, “Don’t show me any emotion, just be blank”, and then he’ll show a picture of a steaming bowl of soup, a big fish, or this and that, or a naked woman, or whatever. And audiences will get the juxtaposition of the image and the face, and will say [to themselves], “Oh, that guy is hungry, he’s sexually aroused… blah, blah blah.” It’s so manipulative on the part of the director. So you have to understand that, you don’t have to overact.

But, you still gotta do the homework. Recently, I auditioned for this movie, and it was really great because this casting director said, “I want to get this right… as many times as you need to go through the scene.” And we went through one pass, and she said, “It’s a little too big, the director wants it minimal, almost so realistic that you’re not even acting.” And in my head, I said, “Gotcha!” That’s where the prep comes along, to be able to go from 0 to 10, or 10 to 0, and all the different degrees, because that’s your job, your job is to adjust to how the director or other people see it, and to re-calibrate your performance to what they want to see.

ASIANCE: Let me ask, for a lot of young actors, what advice would you give to young Asian actors coming to town?

Clyde: Young Asian actors coming to town these days… I’d say don’t take yourself too seriously. And don’t be so sensitive, and don’t personalize a lot.

A lot of times, people will say to me, what is the best acting teacher, or class or this and that, and granted there are good teachers, but take a movement class, learn how to use your body.

Also for me, as the years have come along, the best help has been therapy.

ASIANCE: Hmm… interesting. I think that’s very true but not many people talk about it.

Clyde: Because you get to understand yourself. I used to be so scared of being in an emotional scene, some people can turn on the water works, I mean, cry, like that! (He snaps his fingers) I’d have to yawn, a lot, or smell an onion, and I thought, why is it that I have a problem being able to connect, but if I’m watching a movie and there’s a dog dying, or something like that, or it’s a good movie and I’m relaxed, then I’ll react with tears. And I said to myself, “This is interesting.”

So therapy teaches me, or I learned from therapy, why I got to be so controlling with my emotions, why, especially for Asian actors, or Asian-American actors. We come from a culture that values image, being good, and hiding, “You don’t want people to think such and such… !” If you’re gonna react you should be stoic, don’t show the pain, don’t cry or whatever because you lose face, blah, blah, blah. Well, those are things that are money in the bank for the actor. The actor has to be able to have the scope to touch that.

For the longest time, I learned all these things about how I should deal with my family, my culture – “ don’t act too big, don’t talk too much, because people will look down on you, people will think you’re too bragging, think this and that… “Who do you think you are?’, this type of thing. And I just discovered recently in my session… I thought you couldn’t feel, you couldn’t express this and that, and then the light bulb went on and I went, “No wonder I went into acting!” It’s not about watching Olivier, or the Shakespeare and the words. It was that you could indulge or show or play all these emotional feelings and then the applause is the reward, you get recognition for that, and not criticism.

ASIANCE: Which you didn’t get before when you were growing up.

Clyde:You didn’t get that as you grew up, you get, “No, no, no, you can’t act this way, you can’t act that way.” Also, to be able to channel in a constructive way all experience, slights, racial slights, or class slights, you’re being judged on this.

As a young person growing up in Hawaii in the 50s or 60s, I guess I was very aware. It was just after the war. Social class, the whole thing was changing. It was a paternalistic white plantation mentality. The power structure was white. And at that time, you couldn’t go through the front door of that hotel, you couldn’t go to that beach, you had to go to the back door. All those things imputed into me.

ASIANCE: And that continued in college?

Clyde: When I was in college in my freshman year, this professor came up to me, I think he thought he was doing a wise thing. “You want to be an actor?” he said. “Why? There’s only Teahouse of the August Moon and The King and I, how can you possibly make a living?” I was devastated, I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know how to react, I didn’t know! I was so depressed for the rest of that year. I went back to Hawaii to lick my wounds and was working the night shift in a brewery. And then I looked around at the people working in the brewery, you know, and they would say, “Hey, whatchu reading there?” “It’s a little thing called Lord of the Rings”, I’d reply. And I thought, “If I have to be ten times better than a white actor, that’s what I’m going to have to do”. So I spent that sophomore year auditioning for student-directed projects, children’s theater, directed scenes. I kept looking for the opportunity to be seen, and to be better, work better, have a better work ethic.

Now some people will say that’s unfair, because if you’re white, you don’t have to work that hard. Well boohoo, that’s the reality, and if that’s what it takes to get noticed, that’s what it takes. See, three years later, by the time I graduated from Northwest University theater department, I was considered a working actor in the department. My friends would say, “What do you mean you”re depressed? Jesus, you work more than us white actors!” Now reality said that half the department would cast me and half wouldn’t. The half that didn’t cast me were the ones that would hold me up as an example of a working actor.

ASIANCE: And what was it like when you got to LA?

Clyde: I was in Los Angeles, and now I was an “Oriental” again. See all those roles I played in college and in Colorado were all white roles, but they were character roles. But when I came to LA, I was an “Oriental” actor.

And then I was at East West Players for many years. There was another guy, Ernest Harada, he had gone to LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts) in London, studied with Etienne Decreaux in Paris. So he was quite skilled, but he and I were the only “trained” actors of Asian descent. And the big thing was there was a lot of resentment and probably jealously, but it took me two years to book my first thing. But I still worked in children’s theater, still took classes.

You have to be willing, you sacrifice one thing or the other, you can’t have everything. You can’t go into the discos, karaoke bars, and be social and, oh, by the way you should be taking acting classes! You have to train like an Olympic athlete, like Michelle Kwan, they spend more time on the ice, or the weight room. Training, training, training, that’s the important thing. Acting is sort of like, you say a few words and hit the mark, but if you want to continue it, you have to treat it like a profession and have a discipline to do it.

A lot of people would say, why doesn’t Clyde learn Asian accents or dialects, why is he always trying to do John Wayne and this and that, he’s never gonna get cast as this or that. Okay, a little story if I can go into it. One time I was doing Magnum PI, a 2-hour episode, and in between takes I’d do a John Wayne, (Clyde switches into a John Wayne drawl), “Well boys, sun’s going down, we gotta burn some film, or the black tower ain’t gonna like it.”

And people would laugh and you’d break the ice, and they’d say, “Hey look, an Asian guy who can do John Wayne!” (Clyde switches back into the John Wayne drawl) “I play Ghenghis Khan, call me Subutai.” (Subutai was the primary strategist of Genghis Khan). Everybody would kinda laugh. But a year later, the producers heard about that and they created a character of Gordon Kusumoto who’s a Honolulu police detective who would drive Tom Magnum nuts because he was doing (in a John Wayne drawl) “Well, what do ya mean, Thomas?” And then it was like, you broke a lot of barriers in a subtle way, and people would go, “Oh, he can do John Wayne!”, which was cool.

And then, a year later, they were doing an episode where they brought in all the detectives and the private detectives went back to the show, and I did a scene where the house detective was being played by Stephen J. Cannell, who at the time was Cannell Productions, producer/writer. (Stephen Cannell was writer/producer on many major series, including The Rockford Files, The A-Team, and Hawaii 5-0]. And he loved to moonlight as an actor, and so we’d be talking, and between shots and setups, I’d say, “My two boys, one is married to a Jewish girl, my grand kids are going to Hebrew school and when they’re of age, they’ll be bar mitzvahed… ” And he’d say, “Yeah, wow, that’s interesting!”

There was this CBS series, Wiseguy, chopped up into three seasons, arcs. In the second arc, he created the role of an FBI agent that drove Vinnie Terranova (played by Ken Wahl) crazy with Jewish aphorisms (and of course, Clyde dropped a few Jewish aphorisms on the spot). I wound up doing 3-4 episodes, but that was the series that gave Kevin Spacey his break, because he played Mel Profitt.

And so, what’s the point? The point is, if you try to impress somebody, and try to control it with your skills, you’re gonna hit a blank wall. But by being social and knowing that at least sometimes your moments of auditioning are when they’re just at ease moments, and you get to maybe showcase something. Here I got a chance to break two big barriers and broaden the horizon, and when people said you’ll never be cast using a John Wayne dialect, or British or whatever, you gotta be at a moment’s notice willing to throw something out and have it stick.

I remember doing a commercial, and they said, can you do it like a Scottish man. [Clyde switches into a Scottish brogue] “And yeah, I can do it now, do you want me to be from Glasglow or do you want me to be from Edinborough.” And they’d go, “Wow!”. Not that they used it, but you never know when opportunity will arise. Sorta like what Bob Evans said, “What is luck? Luck is opportunity meeting preparation.” I guess it gets back to the young Asian actors, you gotta be prepared, and also, you never know when that opportunity is gonna arise, so if you’ve prepared it and you’ve done your study… Let’s go back to the football analogy again. “Oh, you’re a football player, okay run a few steps, run 20 paces and cut to the left, cut to the right, throw the ball there. And if you say you can do that, you gotta be ready. But in acting, acting I think is one of the only fields where everybody’s like, I’m an actor. But if you said I’m a concert violinist or a concert pianist, well then, play something! Anybody can say I’m an actor. Well, then act! What else can you do?

I remember one time there were two scenes, based on the true story of a Japanese American basketball coach in Gardena. The first scene was just about basketball practice and it was only partially written. The second scene had all the dialogue, the meaty dialogue that the actor would want to do to show off his stuff. I think I was maybe sixth or seventh in line to go in, and this one guy walks up and goes, “Aw sh–!” “What’s the matter?”, I asked. “You know they don’t have time,” he replied, “the best scene is the second scene, and I have to do the first scene, but I didn’t prepare the first scene.” And I thought, first scene, “Got it!” You prepare for both scenes. That first scene, if you look at it, and the text is just short phrases like, “Hurry up!” or “Shoot!”. It’s basically blank, and you gotta fill in all that empty space. So you make a choice of being that coach, and you improvise – you add, you become, you create that entire practice scene right there in that [audition] room for the camera.

ASIANCE: Any other auditioning tips?

Clyde: I also believe that the audition starts the moment you walk in the that room, and how you present yourself, you shake everybody’s hand, and you go “Hi, how are you?”, instead of just silently walking in, or getting pissed off because nobody’s paying attention to you. And so the moment I walked in I said, “Gee, God, it’s too bad you don’t have time because that second scene was really good, but anyways, aside form that, let’s do the first scene.” And I did the first scene very slowly, just to get different editorial points in and reactions, and if there’s an interest from the director or producer, they’ll say, “Will you do the scene again but would you tighten it up a little bit?” And sure, because you did it slow, you can pull it all back together, but you’re giving them an opportunity to see your work and how you go about it. That piques their interest and then they will want to see if you can follow direction and bring it all together. So I did that. Then the second writer/producer said to the director, “Can he do the second scene?” So to take time, even if it’s 10, 15 seconds, to do things like “Can I rearrange this [the audition set-up in the room]?” is okay. Or to ask, “Would you be camera left or camera right?” And you can tell the energy in the room if there’s interest or not.

I auditioned for House. It was a dramatic kind of scene but a more thoughtful kind of scene. So I did it, kinda very low key and almost very natural. And the exec producer said, “Can you do that again?” and gave some added instructions or ideas. So I did that and I left there saying “Yes! I did my job.” The work comes in managing your expectations. If I nail the scene that means I get the job. And also learning, if you do your job and you did your preparation, you nailed it in the audition, and you have that good feeling and excitement and energy, that’s your reward for the day. If you get the role, then that’s the gravy, your dessert. You have to be able to say, “What’s next, move on!” It’s hard not to go call up [your agent] and ask, “What’s the feedback?” (When actors audition, there’s usually no feedback on the audition. If you get the job, your agent will call, but if you’re not selected, then usually, you don’t hear anything at all.) Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes, you get disappointed, and can’t avoid being disappointed. But if you are disappointed, you have to allow your self to be disappointed, and after 24 hours, you have to move on to the next one.

ASIANCE: Yeah, it’s one of the hardest things to do in acting.

Clyde:You have to treat each audition as an opportunity. Back in 1996 I believe, I got this call from my agent, saying this actor dropped out and they needed me to audition for this role, and I couldn’t say, “how come they didn’t see me [back] in January?” You can’t come in with an attitude.

So I accepted the audition, and they said, “Pick whatever scene you want to do.” So I read the scene, and I thought, “I think I did a TV movie based on this five years before!” And I had kept the older script, and in that script I had notes because I had to speak Japanese, and I remember thinking, “The best scene was the scene in the movie where I had to sing”. I was this Japanese soldier that had to sing a song, but then, if I do the singing scene, they’re probably going to say, can I be commanding with the Japanese language in other situations [because I’m playing a sergeant in a Japanese prison camp]?

So I knew all that when I did my thing, I got all these [Japanese] phrases down, and I created a scene there in the prison camp [at the audition]. And also in my mind I said I would like the sense that the camera would be handheld by the casting person, that they would follow me because I had to move from a standing to a sitting position. So I walked into the room and the camera was on a tripod, and so when I walked in I said, “Are we married to the camera on a tripod? “No, no,” they replied. So I went on, “because I would like to start off here, and I wanna move down there.” So I did, and I could tell I had connected emotionally.

A week later I was headed out to Panang, Malaysia, I got the role. This was Paradise Road, directed by Bruce Beresford (Paradise Road is a true story of a group of women imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp and starred Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Cate Blanchett and Julianna Margulies). It turned out to be one of the best professional and personal experiences of my career.

The director said (and Clyde imitates Bruce Beresford’s British accent), “You know Clyde, I’m putting you in more scenes, because your character, one of the few male characters, is a lead, and I can reflect stuff [in the prison camp] in how you’re going, your character will developed.” And he did. And so my character is so full, he starts off like a mean guy, but he evolves. It was an opportunity to dispel the stereotype of the evil Japanese soldier, because there’s a reason why there’s brutality, the audience does see it. In fact, at a certain point when I do take Glenn Close out into the forest, everybody thinks I’m going to kill her, but instead, I sing to her. So when I sing her the song, even she’s affected, and I say, “Do you like?” There’s this whole transition type of thing. You don’t get that too much, an opportunity to show the development of a person’s humanity, all these different colors.

But at the same time, you have to also be willing to say (and Clyde drops into a nasal character voice), “You want me to audition for this IBM commercial? Or this Fedex commercial and I have to do what?… Oh, okay.” You can’t say, “Oh, I won’t do this thing.” Because in today’s business, the lines between feature film and television commercials, it’s all changing. Now I look at it as you need to develop a philosophy of revenue streams – you do commercials, feature films, TV movies, episodes, sitcoms, voiceover commercials and voiceover animation, there’s all these different fields of the acting thing. The British had this great thing, “Oh, I’ll do everything – radio, TV films. We’re actors, we’re paid to act, and that’s what we do.”

ASIANCE: Let me change direction a bit and ask, what do you think Asian audiences could do to help bring up the state of the Asian artist?

Clyde: Well I’ll tell you a story. Back in the 50s when there were one or two or three TV channels, it didn’t matter, people would go, “Hey, watch this scene there’s an Asian face!” You never saw someone like us on TV. But when we did All American Girl with Margaret Cho, really the first Asian American sitcom, all of a sudden, instead of support form the community, it was like “No, why do you have a Chinese people playing Korean? Why do you have this Japanese person playing Korean?” It was like the death of a thousand cuts, all of this complaining, rather than having support for this show. Asians are the only ones that are so critical, that emphasize authenticity, which basically says, Vietnamese for Vietnamese, Chinese for Chinese, Japanese for Japanese. The whole idea of acting, you don’t have this with the whites, the whites have been able to play all kinds of things. Rutger Hauer plays a Brit, plays a Dutch, plays a Russian, plays a German. Bruce Beresford was saying, “Clyde, I’ve got a Vietnamese project, but I don’t know if you can play Vietnamese”. And rather than going to Bruce and saying, “Bruce, you stupid @#$%!”, I said “Bruce, let’s put it this way, if you’re doing a Hispanic project, are you only going to say El Salvadorians for Salvadorians, Mexicans for Mexicans? Look at Andy Garcia, he’s Cuban and plays Italian.

Now also along those lines if you’re going to do a project that deals with Haitians and you shoot in Haiti, are you only gonna have blacks that are from Haiti or speak the patois? No, you’re going to see a black actor and say, “can you portray, you know, whatever?” Since I’ve started in this business, it was wide open, you did your research, but now, the code word is “authentic”. Now it’s a silent code word, to separate you [Asians from others].

ASIANCE: It’s interesting when you watch 24, it’s a Middle Eastern storyline, but half of the actors are really Indian actors. A lot of them are not Pakistani, and they’re not Arabic. The Egyptians are actually Indian actors. It a funny kind of thing.

Clyde: Absolutely, because that’s what the actor’s role is, is to give a good representation and to dispel, and to promote the illusion. Actors are creating an illusion. It’s interesting, because I see a lot of foreign films, as a member of the Foreign Film Academy committee, I’m watching a South American film, and I’m thinking, “Isn’t that actor in a Brazilian film? A Chilean film and an Argentine film?” Well yeah, of course, and they’ll bring in some Spanish actors to be in these films.

Well anyway, long story short and to get off the soap box, to young Asian actors, you got to do homework, you gotta know who your playwrights are, you gotta know the history of films, what is the history of films, and I think a lot of the problem is, in some ways, there’s been an acceptance, so a lot of these [young] people have not hit the obstacle of discrimination. So it’s changed, and it’s not changed at the same time. So you have to understand, or at least educate yourself to what the situation is.

And if anything, I meet young actors, before they get the big role and after they get the big role and they become a little successful, and then the paparazzi come into it. And the question is, are you doing anything to insure your success? Because all good things come to an end. Are you able to transition, are you able to deal with transition, or at least stay one step ahead of whatever the wave is. It’s like Johnny Depp. He’s a protean actor. He’s been able to adapt, if you think from his start on 21 Jump Street, to where he is now, he’s an actor of broad range, but there are many actors that limit themselves to, “Oh, I’ll do these marital arts… ” You know martial artists are not as box office these days, you need actors that can do both. As you become older, you’re not able to see yourself. The business is about about packaging, and the packaging doesn’t even have to be radical. It can go from a pop up to a plastic box. The important thing to think about is, we’re all here to sell soap, basically, we’re an advertising vehicle, we’re a vehicle to make money for projects. I think that’s what the [average] actor doesn’t understand, but the painter does, or the sculptor, because his eyes or their eyes are always looking at form, light.

ASIANCE: Well thanks Clyde, that’s a lot of great tips for younger actors, and a great insight into the business for those who aren’t in entertainment. Break a leg with Harold and Kumar 2.

Clyde: My pleasure, thanks for the time.