Daniel Dae Kim on the pay cut he took going from Lost to Hawaii Five-0: "It was drastic, and it was never made up"

Vulture

In an in-depth interview with Vulture, Kim spoke frankly about the contract negotiations that led him and Grace Park to exit Hawaii Five-0 in 2017. Kim says he it wasn't his first renegotiation. In fact, he credits CBS with a previous renegotiation that gave him his own production company, 3AD, which paved the way for him executive producing The Good Doctor. But when his contract was up in 2017, Kim says he wanted pay parity with his co-stars after initially being misled into believing he had signed on for an ensemble drama. "Let me put it this way: One thing that has never really properly been reported is the amount of pay cut I took to do Hawaii Five-0 from Lost," he says. "It was drastic, and it was never made up." How big was his pay cut? "Significant," he says. So what was the goal at the negotiating table? "Make us all equal," he says. "Make us all the ensemble that I thought we always were, and get me back to where I was with Lost. And I didn’t think that was an unreasonable position to take." Kim says he was transparent about wanting a pay bump with his castmates, including Park. "I was transparent with Grace about my goals, and Grace had her own goals," he said. "And in some ways they coincided with mine, and in some ways they didn’t. But the two things we had in common were that our contracts were up at the same time and we were both Asian American on a show in Hawaii, where the Asian American population is significant. And I would also say I was proud of the fact that we as a show hired a lot of Asian Americans. I think we need to talk about the good with the bad. In terms of representation, we probably hired more Asian American actors than any other show over the same time span." Kim adds it was intentional for him and Park to walk away at the same time. "I think that was definitely a part of the decision process," he says. "If people like Grace and I cannot make those kinds of decisions, how can we expect anyone else to? We had the luxury of being able to say no." Did he feel like your castmates were allies with him in his renegotiation? "I think any time you have an ensemble of actors, everyone’s objectives are unique and individual," he says. "So it’s hard for me to collectively say whether they were allies in this. And I do know that the way things got spun by the end changed my relationships with them." ALSO: Kim recalls talking to Lost's Damon Lindelof and J.J. Abrams about the pilot's Asian stereotypes that were like "a land mine."