Hoon Lee as Job, who is much more than a man who likes lipstick and pretty things.
It might be easy to write off the series Banshee as just another testasterone-heavy action series with a lead actor who regularly (and thankfully) is without clothes. However, as we've seen throughout season one (which wraps up tonight at 10pm on Cinemax), there is much more not just in the town of Banshee but also to it's cavalcade of interesting characters.
We had talked previously with lead Antony Starr and one of the more interesting components to his character, Lucas Hood, is his relationship with Job, played with tip-to-tail finesse by Hoon Lee. Whereas Hood oozes masculinity and tends to start a fight and then ask questions later, Job is a blend of sophistication, smarts, snark and also happens to sport the most fabulous make-up and clothes.
In our chat with Lee earlier this week, we touched on what makes Job tick, his emotional connection to Hood is and, of course, how do you label a character who seems to be such an eclectic blend of everything?
AfterElton: Let’s back up to when you were auditioning for the role. Was it all attitude or were you in full Job clothing?
Hoon Lee: You're only given a certain amount of time to prepare and I thought I would just try to access him through the entry points where I felt most comfortable, where I had some fluency already, and one of those was the technical side, which is computer hacker, and I have something of a technical background.
And then I thought that the scene that I had to do, which was actually the audition piece with the diner scene, that there was a real strength there and a real aggression, and these were things I knew I could access. So rather than kind of trying to create a full-blown entity, I tried to come to grip with the parts that I felt I could do well and kind of play to that, and then have fun with the rest of it. Just really try to use it as an opportunity to try things I haven't tried before. And that ended up working out well.
If Job shows up in your small town diner, best thing to do is RUN!
AE:When I talked to Antony, he saw the Job/Hood relationship as more brotherly than anything else. What's your take?
HL: I think that it's like any sort of family relationship where the intensity of the love and affection can often lead you to behavior that isn't necessarily the most conducive to love and affection. Antony's character is a very impulsive person. And Job is someone who, by his trade, is about trying to see the big picture and control things. There's a dynamic there that is really predicated on a lot of love but they're fundamentally different styles. And that's partly why they work well together, because they can be complementary. Very complementary.
I happen to have some insight into their back story from the writers, which I think is actually a beautiful back story, and I hope it comes to light at some point, and I'm not really at liberty to talk about it, but I will say that the amount of loyalty that Job feels for Antony's character is extremely intense, and that's been very, very helpful for me as an actor to know.
AE:Can you define Job's sexuality for me because in different pieces I've seen him referred to as transgender or transvestite and then a drag queen...
HL: That's an interesting question. My understanding of Job, and this is my understanding because the reality is all of these characters to some degree are still evolving…I think that's been a huge advantage to the freedom that Cinemax was given and the sort of collaborative nature that Greg [Yaitanes, Exec Producer] and Jonathan [Tropper, EP) and David [Schickler, EP] have volunteered to engage with the actors in. It's just this idea that we're all kind of making this world together. That's my huge caveat to what I'm about to say.
I feel like, for Job, the whole idea of figuring out the label of who he is and every aspect of that is something he's not interested in. And that Job as a character, as a person, is somebody who is in a constant state of evaluation and evolution. And that's partly why his look and presentation keeps changing. And this is something that we've thought about in terms of sort of a guiding light for his styling and his presentation in general, but it's been fueled by larger thoughts about who this person might be.
As I said before, part of how I understand this person and part of how I feel he's different from characters before that I've seen that may have been transgender or have been transvestites or have been cross-dressers or anything along that gradient is technical awareness and what's interesting to me about that is that in the online world, the technical world that we live in now, identity itself is constantly in flux. And to me, that's central to who he is, because to be a hacker at his level or a hacker at his level means that you have to live in that world…he's kind of an explicit shape-changer.
The man that puts the swagger and sass in Job is actor Hoon Lee
AE:Have you ever played a role before where people all of a sudden make assumptions about your sexuality?
HL: I guess people have always assumed I'm straight, based on my other roles. I guess it's happened all the time. But you know, the reality is what we're creating is a story and a work of fiction and a piece of entertainment, and to me, it's not really my explicit task to kind of call attention to where reality and this fantasy separate. Not because I don't want to do that, but just because I don't think that that's really anybody's job. So I don't really have an issue with whatever people take away from it. It's just that there's a truth there. There's something that's accurate, and there's something that's not accurate, and that's really all it is. So I don't really have any feelings about it one way or the other. If someone came to me and they were surprised that I'm not gay, I'm not really sure why you would make that assumption, but I can only hope that it's because you think the character's convincing and you make assumptions about the character, but at that point I would say, ‘You realize you're making assumptions about the character?’
So to me, again, that's what's kind of interesting about a character like this, is really, as far as I can tell, and being Asian-American just happens in a different way for ethnic minorities as well, but it's interesting to see people take one aspect of your being, like in my case ethnicity, and then how they transpose that to other facets of your person and what that means to them. Because really all it means is my ethnic background. It doesn't mean even my nationality. Right? But they'll make assumptions about everything.
And similarly, the only thing that would really prove one way or the other that Job was gay, straight, heterosexual, any sexual, whatever it might be, is if you actually saw him, there's some evidence in the story that lets you do that, and we haven't seen that.
AE:Job gets to kick some ass in the season finale, which is great to see. It’s so elaborate. How long did it take to shoot?
HL: All props to Miguel Sapochnik, who directed the episode, because it seems like a logistical nightmare to me, but he kept it humming and kept it moving, and I will say the stunt team that played most of Rabbit's men, they were just outstanding, and I can't praise them highly enough. But I was in hog heaven. I mean, it was really, really fun to do. Again, similarly to the whole character of Job, I've not really had the opportunity to do a full-fledged action sequence before, really.
And to do that and to do the diner scene, it was a real thrill, because you feel like you're using different muscles and trying to learn different things, and you're trying to tell stories in different ways. Like what can you do to try to demonstrate something about the character, even in a situation this chaotic? So it's a brand new sort of context to do that, but it's a wonderful challenge, and in that way I loved every second of it.
Despite his hard persona, Job would do just about anything for Hood (Antony Starr)
AE:In the finale's fight scene, Job literally has his war paint on, which I loved. But even his outfit is fabulous. Do you have any input into that, or is that all just the show and the costume people?
HL: I do have input, but I will say, Patia Prouty, who's our costume designer, she is like my patron saint and she's incredible, because she really thinks very, very deeply about the characters and who they are and what they come from. She did a lot of homework and so working with her on Job, we both knew it was going to be quite intense.
We started that process quite early and the way that it ended up evolving was she kind of established this home base of ideas, like, ‘This is kind of the family of ideas I'm thinking about,’ and that allowed me to kind of learn that. Learn that kind of universe. And then, whenever I had a thought about it, I was more than welcome to contribute it. But for the most part, I trusted her, because I felt like she really understood the character. I said this in other places, but in many ways, I feel like because the presentation of Job is so integral to the character itself, I feel like the work I did with Patia, she was co-authoring that performance in a lot of ways. She was really contributing to the external things that would help inform decisions I was making about the character, and vice versa.
AE:I was actually going to ask you in season two, would you like to see Job have a love interest?
HL: I guess I don't have a particular drive for a particular kind of interaction. Except that the thing I loved about the finale was that that was the first time that I got to play with everybody in the cast as an actor, and I really like the cast. We were all in Charlotte together so we got to know each other a bit. Job doesn't even show up in [the town of] Banshee until the end of Episode Four...so I was like, ‘Oh, finally. I get to meet these people.’ And that's great. But for me, I don't really have a designation or some sort of a wish list of the sorts of things that happen to the character. I trust that the writers will allow interesting things to happen. As long as they're interesting, then I don't really care.
The Banshee season finale airs tonight at 10pm on Cinemax. Banshee has already been renewed for a second season on Cinemax.
