Daniel Dae Kim Talks How ‘Butterfly' Fulfilled His Dream Of Shooting In South Korea

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6 hours ago

Starring in Lost for six years and Hawaii Five-O for ten years — and armed with a host of other enviable credits — Daniel Dae Kim counts recent series Butterfly as one of his most personal projects yet.
Besides playing the role of U.S. intelligence operative David Jung in the series, Kim also serves as Butterfly's executive producer through his production company 3AD, which developed the show under a deal with Amazon MGM Studios.
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Since its premiere on August 13, the series has shot up the streamer's top 10 series list, reaching the second spot today.
Multi-hyphenate Kim on acting and producing
Juggling both exec producing and acting, Kim is also in the middle of shooting a season of Avatar: The Last Airbender in Vancouver.
Kim's 3AD production company also recently produced the ABC television series The Good Doctor, adapted from the 2013 South Korean series of the same name.
'If we're lucky enough, we'll be greenlit for a season two of Butterfly and we'll be prepping that,' Kim tells Deadline. 'I look forward to it, but my company has multiple projects in active development right now, so we're plugging away.'
Butterfly follows former intelligence operative David Jung, who is hiding in South Korea. He has his life blown to pieces when the consequences of an impossible decision from his past come back to haunt him, and he finds himself hunted by Rebecca, a young assassin — and Caddis, the sinister spy organization she works for.
Kim said that he heard about Butterfly for the first time during a meeting with the head of comics publisher Boom! Studios.
'He talked about some of his titles, and Butterfly was the one that I was interested in. It was a great father-daughter story,' says Kim. 'But in the original comic book, they're played by characters who are white, and it takes place in the U.S. and Europe. I asked whether or not they would mind changing the characters to Asian-American and set it in Korea. Shooting something in Korea has always been a goal of mine, and they were open to the idea.'
Filming in South Korea
Kim feels a deep connection with Korea through his family's heritage — and the affinity has been reciprocated. Just over a year ago, Kim was named an honorary citizen of Seoul, receiving the title from Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon and the Seoul Film Commission.
Butterfly's shoot took place over seven months, starting in winter and wrapping in summer.
Kim says he has a 'working knowledge of Korean' and took great care to spend an extended period in Korea, hire a large local crew and present Korean culture in meticulous detail — from the food, to the country's different accents.
'The cuisine is different regionally, and the people are different. It's a little bit like Italy, that there are different dialects and accents, depending on where you go in the country,' says Kim. 'Korea is a character in our show.
'We shot in over 20 cities all throughout South Korea, and I loved showcasing the mountainside, countryside as well as the skyscrapers of Seoul. I love that we got to shoot in Busan too, which is where I was born,' adds Kim.
Besides shooting in Busan, Kim also picks out Andong, far south-east of Seoul, as another of his favorite shooting locations.
'I really liked shooting in Andong, which was in the first episode where you see SUVs crossing a small river. That was literally how we had to get to our location,' says Kim. 'The scenery was so beautiful, the mountainside that goes into the river, and we had this wonderful fog that rolled in, in the middle of the night, which created this eerie atmosphere for all the night shots. I remember commenting at the time that a lot of studios would pay a lot of money to get this effect, and we just had it.
'Our crew traveled with us and I loved that, because we had the same crew no matter where we went in South Korea. I liked that continuity,' adds Kim.
'Food is such a big part of Korean culture, and I wanted to showcase the food as part of the culture,' says Kim.
Referring to a scene in the first episode where Jung is making a hotteok (Korean pancake), Kim says that his character cooks food 'as an expression of love.
'Growing up and being an immigrant family from Korea, the words 'I love you' weren't very often said, but the way my parents showed their love is by asking if I had eaten or preparing a meal as soon as they got home. That love language is something we wanted to put into the show,' adds Kim.
On working with Park Hae-soo and co-star Reina Hardesty
The first episode of Butterfly also stars Park Hae-soo (Squid Game, Prison Playbook).
'He's an incredible presence and such a fine actor,' says Kim, about collaborating with Park. 'I felt that the scene between the two of us was one of my favorite in the whole series. I have a lot of respect for him as an artist and as a person, and I consider us lucky to have been able to work with him.'
On working with co-star Reina Hardesty (The Flash), Kim says: 'She came in very prepared and it was easy to build a rapport with her. We had a few meals, went over scripts together, and we were able to talk about our relationship in the series. The work that is done off-stage is just as important as what happens on camera.'
While Kim has worked with some of the most established names in Hollywood and abroad, when asked about other filmmakers or actors he would love the opportunity to work with in the near future, Kim picks out Christopher Nolan and Destin Daniel Cretton as among his dream collaborators stateside, as well as Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook in Korea.
Expressing Korean-American identity
Reflecting on some of the themes in Butterfly, Kim says that the series is ultimately about identity and family.
'We wanted to make sure we expressed the nuances of what it is like to be Korean-American versus Korean, versus white American,' says Kim. 'It was a very intentional choice on our part to mix the two languages [English and Korean], because that's what Korean Americans do when they speak Korean to each other.
'That's what I speak to my parents, and you'll see in later episodes that one of the characters will criticize David's level of Korean, and that was also an intentional choice, because very often, there's the assumption that because you live in America and you're of Korean descent, you speak perfect Korean. The Korean we speak as as Korean-Americans is different. It's accented. It's not perfect, and I wanted to shine a light on the fact that the language is different depending on your experience of the country.'
On making a stop in Korea to celebrate Butterfly's premiere, Kim said: 'It was important to us to have a Korea premiere, because we wanted to show our respect for the country, the people, the crew and the actors who worked so hard to bring our show to life. I consider this show to be equally Korean and American.'
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