‘Blockbuster’ Star Randall Park Is Hopeful That Asian Americans Can “Just Exist And Be Happy Existing”

I was 16 when I got my first job at Blockbuster Video. It was the 1990s and Blockbuster was the biggest home entertainment franchise in the United States with more than 9000 video stores and 65 million registered customers. A new workplace comedy series called Blockbuster taps into nostalgia for this bygone era, and is streaming today on Netflix (oh the irony!). The show’s star, Randall Park–who plays Timmy, the owner of the last Blockbuster store on earth–tells Decider how much he misses having to “work for your content.” From his parents driving him to the video store to “walking up and down those aisles” and reading the backs of VHS cases to look at “the little photos in it,” Park loved the entire experience as a self-proclaimed “analog guy.” He also took the act of choosing a video very seriously because “the success of your night or your next few nights were based on this decision that you were going to make at the store.” Perhaps that’s why he’d “always go back to the same handful of movies” and end up “choosing When Harry Met Sally or something.”

A fan of romantic comedies, Park once wrote that “Long Duk Dong”–a fictional buffoonish Asian foreign exchange student from the 1984 romcom Sixteen Candles– made it impossible for him to get a date in real life. As one of the only popular representations of Asian men in 1980s Hollywood, “Long Duk Dong” (played by Gedde Watanabe) emasculated Asian men for decades. In contrast, Randall Park has played romantic leads in films like Always Be My Maybe (2019) (where he punched Keanu Reeves, who played himself, and ended up with Ali Wong’s character). He also starred as husband to Constance Wu’s character in the TV series Fresh Off the Boat (2015-2020), which even critiqued “Long Duk Dong” in one of its episodes. In Blockbuster, Park is once again a romantic lead–starring opposite Melissa Fumero in a “will they/won’t they” storyline–which Park finds “great joy” in performing. Park tells Decider, “It’s a dream come true…because I get to play these roles that were so different from what was available back then and…I grew up loving rom coms–just anything romantic and funny was like my jam.” When asked about what he represents for Asian American men today, he demures and says he hopes they can “just exist and be happy existing.”

While having an Asian American man as a romantic lead is rare, it is even rarer to see an interracial couple of color lead a series. In Blockbuster, Randall Park stars alongside Latina actor Melissa Fumero and a supporting cast of mostly Black and Latine characters. Park credits the diverse cast to creator and executive producer Vanessa Ramos (Superstore, Brooklyn Nine-Nine) finding “the right people for each of the characters…. [who] happen to be people of color, which is really cool.” When I worked at Blockbuster in the 1990s, I had a Latine assistant manager and Black and Brown co-workers. It’s good to finally see my diverse world accurately represented on TV.

Randall Park continues to break barriers when it comes to Asian American representation–this time as a director. In 2019, he directed a live reading of When Harry Met Sally starring Steven Yeun and Maya Erskine as Harry and Sally, and he just wrapped production on a film adaptation of Shortcomings, a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine. Park sees Shortcomings as “progress” in Asian American representation because the story “felt like this glimpse into a life” that he’s “never seen reflected in movies and TV” when it comes to flawed Asian Americans characters who are “kind of shitty.”  Described as a “hilariously irreverent examination of racial politics, sexual mores, and pop culture,” the comedic drama stars Justin H. Min, Sherry Cola, Ally Maki, Sonoya Mizuno, and Jacob Batalon.

Despite having access to tons of videos as a Blockbuster customer service representative in the 1990s, I rarely saw any content that reflected my life as an Asian American. I never imagined that there would someday be a Blockbuster series starring an Asian American. I look forward to seeing more representations of Asian Americans who can “just exist” as complex humans on screen who love and laugh–flaws and all.

Nancy Wang Yuen is a sociologist and film critic of the people. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram.