You star Nicole Kang went on vacation to beautiful Santorini, Greece, and didn’t quite get the pictures she wanted. Kang, who plays Lynn on the show, shared pictures of herself lounging on a boat, looking stunning in a wine-colored bikini. Another reel showed her walking up Santorini’s many stairs, looking exhausted. “Trying to give more windswept than winded but the stairs are winning,” she jokingly captioned the post. Here’s how Kang feels about her part in You, and diversity in Hollywood.
Kang was incredibly nervous when she joined the cast of You. “I was in the show, You, and that was a huge shift for me,” she says. “It’s my same producer and even the same director for some episodes at Batwoman, Marcos Siega, who have seen me grow up. I remember I had never really been on a set before; I had been an extra and did some student films, a ton of theater but that was the first time that I had been on a set of that scale before. I remember I was in hair and makeup and felt like the most pampered and fabulous person (laughs). I was walking around in my own music video. They told me we are going to be filming episode two and I had only received episode one, so as a theater or as any actor, I always thought my first time I was going to be so prepared and so ready but here I was sitting in a full panic in hair. I just told myself to breathe.”
Kang is proud of her Batwoman role (as Mary Hamilton) and hopes there will be many more like it. “Don’t we just love strong female characters and female empowerment?” she says. “I think that’s what our show arguably does best. I think, you know, if you look at our top cast, it’s overwhelmingly women, and that doesn’t happen. And we aren’t talking about men; we aren’t needing men to tell the audience about ourselves. That is my favorite thing. That is also one of my favorite things about Mary. She is unapologetically herself in the way she dresses, in the way she comes into a room, in the way she takes on risk.”
Kang has a soft spot in her heart for New York. “I always say New York was my coming of age story, it was my cultural awakening. In that way, I owe it so much,” she says. “All of the hard lessons and the big triumphs for me, at the beginning of my career, all happened in New York City, which is like the prologue of a book. The move to LA was for work since I am in Vancouver shooting Batwoman. I thought it would be great to have my US-base be in LA since I am here for ten months out of the year.”
Kang goes out of her way to be kind to newcomers. “I am such an empath; when we have guest stars, I can feel their energy,” she says. “I like to say, you are doing incredible. If we have time and a lot of scenes together I definitely make an effort to rehearse with them. My favorite part is when you feel the trust and you can feel entitled in a good way to the space and the scene. Maybe you can try something or something comes about that you didn’t anticipate— it’s like lightning in a bottle—that’s what we are trying to capture.”
Kang is proud of her Korean heritage, and representing it on screen. “Diversity, it’s this beautiful thing,” she says. “It’s this beautiful palette, because, listen, we tell incredible stories, but the people in Gotham, I think that’s a really, really great, exciting thing about it; it goes along with the tempo and the themes of our show in the first place. If we’re going to make another show in Gotham in 2019, 2020, then what are we going to say this time that hasn’t already been said before? The thing is, is that Gotham is made up of a bunch of people, a bunch of different people who have tons of different layered experiences.”