He didn’t know he was auditioning for Avatar: The Last Airbender

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This is a CBC Podcast. I'm Jill Deacon, in for Tom Power. Welcome to Q. I wonder if you've ever had this happen. You have really fond memories of an animated series that you absolutely loved as a kid.

I mean, the show that you woke up early for on Saturday mornings. And then, has there ever been a remake of that show? If so, you probably know that feeling of nervous anticipation. will the remake live up to the love that you have of the original?

Paul Sun-Hyung Lee knows exactly what that feels like. You might know him best for his role as Appa, or Mr. Kim, in Kim's Convenience. Or if you're a fan of Star Wars and The Mandalorian, you know him for his role as Captain Carson Teva. But for the past couple of years, he's been stepping into another massive franchise

with Netflix's live-action adaptation of Avatar, The Last Airbender. Now, I should clarify, we're not talking about the blue people avatar here, the one that James Cameron made. I'm talking about The Last Airbender.

It originally came out in 2005 as an animated series. It's a fantasy adventure following a young boy named Ang. He has special powers, and his job is to stop an army from the Fire Nation as it wages a war for global domination.

Now, if you're not familiar with it, I really cannot overstate just how popular this show is. Millions of fans around the world gathered around the TV, probably with Froot Loops, to watch it.

To this day, it is still a hugely streamed series. In the live-action adaptation, Paul plays Uncle Iroh, a retired Fire Nation general who was a bit haunted by the sins of his past. I got to talk to him all about it.

Here is my conversation with Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. Paul, welcome. Nice to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Congratulations on the second season, and I understand there's a third.

I was reading something interesting about this, that as soon as the announcement came about that there was going to be a live-action version of Avatar, there was a real push from the fan base to have you cast as Uncle Iroh. How aware were you of that?

I sort of knew a little bit about it. Do you have a sense as to why that would? Honestly, I think it was because I didn't watch the series until 2017, I think. We're still shooting Kim's Convenience at the time.

And actually it was Jean Yoon who she had seen the entire series with her son. And she said, you need to watch this. You're a nerd. You'll love this.

And so I did. And I absolutely fell in love with it. And so there were some rumblings out there that had been fan casted by a lot of people who were fans of the animated series. And, you know, when they heard Netflix was adapting, they said, well, who would you cast in this?

And immediately I think I sprung to mind just because I'm an older Asian gentleman with facial hair. And I spoke with an accent in the show. And that is, if you boil down the absolute sort of bare bones, like the simplest sort of description of Uncle Iroh in the animated series, that's about it, basically. I mean, I look at that and I kind of go, yeah, that fits.

I see that. I can see that. You're being very modest, of course. You're not mentioning at all your talent and your charisma and all the things that fans love about you in any role.

And anyway, so obviously the fans got their wish. But I also understand that in the step in between, which was your audition, you didn't even know you were auditioning for this. You thought you were auditioning for a basketball film called Blue Dawn, which is what? Part of their hush-hush, we mustn't sort of let word out even to those auditioning that this show is even happening.

So we can't even tell you what you're going for? Yeah, it's standard practice now with a lot of studios, actually, just because they're so worried about leaks happening online. And one of the sources of leaks is people auditioning for it and saying, hey, so they're casting for these roles and it comes out there. And then the problem with that is fans love to speculate.

And they'll get a snippet of information completely out of context and then they will build entire theories behind that. And there is a subset of fans who like to create their own fiction in their head and they just sort of go off the deep end. It can get out of control. It does. And I think that just sort of speaks to the level of passion that fans have for any given sort of intellectual property that they're fans of. But at the same time, studios want to be able to surprise and delight fans. And how do you do that? You layer it with different levels of security.

And so, yes, I did not know I was auditioning for Avatar The Last Airbender. I did think it was a basketball movie. In fact, I almost didn't submit an audition for it because I was feeling lazy and I thought, basketball? I'm not a huge basketball fan.

But I thought, oh, I'll do it because the lines in the audition were so well written. And I did and immediately forgot about it to the point where a month later when I got the callback from my agent, I didn't know what it was for. Blue Dawn. I couldn't even remember it. And then when I saw it, it was for, oh, the basketball movie. Cool. I'd always wanted to be in a sports movie. So, okay, let's go.

At what point did you realize, no, this is actually much more up my alley? It was actually- Self-described geek. This was very big deal for you. It was actually during the callback session because they said, oh, it's a director and

producer session. They will be on the Zoom call. And I thought, oh, okay, this is like, I've