Asian American Actors Are Finally Getting Romantic Lead Roles

It was not long ago that the actor and writer Joel Kim Booster first began going to auditions only to quickly realize that the roles available to him as an Asian American man were severely limited.

“It does not get better from here, no matter how many Chinese-food delivery boys you play,” he recalled being told by other Asian American actors.

But Booster kept at it. And eventually, in 2022, he got to portray a gay Asian American man in “Fire Island,” a groundbreaking rom-com that he also wrote. “So much of that movie,” Booster said, “is just a literal transcript from my life.”

As it turned out, things did get a little better for Asian American men in Hollywood during the decade that Booster spent toiling. And he senses that the momentum has continued in the two years since “Fire Island” debuted.

Many of the newest Asian and Asian American stories seem unconcerned with “the white gaze,” he said. And so “the conversation has sort of moved on for a lot of people,” he said, adding that his movie “almost feels a little retrograde now.”

Indeed, since the 2018 blockbuster “Crazy Rich Asians” became a box office hit, Asian and Asian American stories and characters have proliferated in American pop culture. And after decades of degrading, often emasculating portrayals, Asian and Asian American men like Booster have been at the center of the new work, often playing the sort of hunky hero parts that Hollywood long kept out of reach.