Justin H. Min from Umbrella Academy and Beef never struggled with failure until he pursued acting

NEW YORK – Five years after Justin H. Min began pursuing acting by Googling “how to pursue acting”, he thought he was getting the hang of it. He had made a viral commercial and was in contention for three major roles.

He landed none of them.

“I was not nervous and I did everything I wanted to,” the Korean-American actor recalled of the auditions. “And that’s the most devastating, because you’re like, ‘I guess I just don’t have it.’”

It was in this less-than-healthy headspace that he decided to pivot to a different unstable profession: travel writing. He had caught on with a British magazine, and it seemed he might cobble together full-time work as a freelance writer if he got on a plane to London.

So he told his manager he was moving. But rather than beg him to stay, as Min had secretly hoped, the manager gave his full blessing. Before he could head for the airport, though, a fellow actor urged him to reconsider. That was timely encouragement that set Min, now 33, on the path to “a star-making performance”, as a critic for The New York Times put it, in the new comedy film Shortcomings (which opens at The Projector in Singapore on Aug 31), as well as fan-favourite turns in the

Netflix series Beef (2023)

and The Umbrella Academy (2019 to present).

“This sounds absurd, but I don’t think I’ve really struggled with failure until I started to pursue acting,” Min said in a pre-Hollywood strike interview. “So I will absolutely savour this.”

Indeed, everything in the first 20ish years of his life had come to him with relative ease. He concedes this only sheepishly and with many disclaimers about how fortunate he feels.

In Cerritos, California, the predominantly Asian suburb where he grew up, he felt little sense of difference. He found that most success was attainable through application. Min was class president all four years of high school and elected king of the winter formal. He was so good in speech and debate competitions that he won thousands of dollars in prize money that helped pay for a Cornell University education. Given his gifts, he thought he might become a lawyer – or maybe a politician.

But on the day he was to graduate from college, he woke up to nine missed calls. His grandfather, who had flown in for the occasion, had died that morning. And so Min’s commencement walk ended in a teary embrace with his family.

The death of his grandfather pushed him to reflect during a solo cross-country road trip from New York back home to Cerritos.

“What do I really want to do?” Min recalled asking himself. Life was fleeting, he now understood. Becoming a lawyer or a politician just did not feel right any more. He liked public speaking, writing and storytelling. And back under his parents’ roof, he was near Los Angeles anyway. He decided to give acting a shot.

He soon discovered how hard the business of acting really was and that applying himself would not be enough, after back-to-back acting rejections. But as he pondered his next move, he had dinner with a friend, Japanese-American actress Amy Okuda. She sent a note about Min to her manager Joshua Pasch, who got in touch with him almost immediately. Pasch even had Min submit an audition tape for superhero series The Umbrella Academy before the pair met.

“The rest is history,” Mr Pasch said. “He was on the show a month later.”

Min had landed the role of Ben Hargreeves on what would become a hit for Netflix. His part was modest at first – a dead brother in a superhuman sibling squad who occasionally shows up as a ghost-like figure that only a drug-addled sibling, Klaus, can see. The character had very little screen time, and Min was not a series regular initially.

But Ben became surprisingly popular in Min’s hands. Showrunner Steve Blackman came up with a way to expand the role and even bring Ben back to life as a different, meaner version of himself in later seasons.

“The character of Ben doesn’t really exist that much in the graphic novel” on which Umbrella Academy is based, Blackman said. “I wrote Ben in to be someone that Klaus could talk to and only Klaus could see.”

But, he added, “the minute Justin embodied the character, I’m like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do so much more’”.

The Umbrella Academy was an “I made it” moment for Min. But he would also earn acclaim two years later for his thoughtful, sincere portrayal of the titular robot in After Yang (2021), a quiet science-fiction drama starring Colin Farrell.

Then came the black comedy-drama Beef, starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, on which he played Edwin, an irritatingly perfect leader of a Korean church.

Series director Lee Sung Jin was best friends with Min’s brother, Jason, in college. Lee said he had called Jason Min, an admired praise leader, into the writers’ room to help craft the character of Edwin. It was a role Lee said he had always intended for Justin H. Min to fill.

Both Min and Lee recalled being in Las Vegas years earlier for Jason Min’s bachelor party and promising each other that they were going to make it in Hollywood and that they would work together when they did.

“Drunk confidence,” Lee said.

Now Justin H. Min is playing another Ben. This one, the main character in Shortcomings, is not a ghost but a flawed would-be film-maker who, in the words of a girlfriend, is brimming with “anger, depression, your weird self-hatred issues and just the relentless negativity”. The film is based on a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine and is directed and produced by Korean-American actor Randall Park in his feature directorial debut.

Min “is probably the only person who could have played him in the way that he did, with such nuance”, said Japanese-American actress Ally Maki, who plays Ben’s girlfriend Miko.

Min holds on to one particular memory from the movie. Ben is sprinting through the West Village – that classic movie moment when the hero tries to salvage the relationship before it is gone forever. In the midst of the scene, he thought, “This is crazy that I am in New York in the middle of this busy West Village street, running as the lead of this movie.”

And he remembered how some of his favourite movies had iconic running shots.

“I never thought that I was going to be the guy who was running,” he said. NYTIMES

Shortcomings opens at The Projector on Aug 31.