Ep. 14: Stephen Park

Before he was Sonny the shopkeeper in Do the Right Thing, or Mike Yanagita in Fargo, or Nescaffier in The French Dispatch, Stephen Park was a confused college student.

His father was a doctor. So naturally, Park enrolled in a lot of science classes at Boston University. But it never really clicked.

“After my second year, I was on academic probation,” he says.

After transferring to SUNY Binghamton, he continued to struggle. Just before dropping out of college, his girlfriend suggested he take a semester full of classes he wanted to take, not classes he thought his family expected him to take.

So he signed up for four theater classes: acting, mime, voice, body work. He loved it.

“It didn’t feel like school. I had associated school with pain and torture and things I didn’t like to do,” he says. “It was alien to me to be having fun and enjoying what I was doing.”

In this episode, we talk with Stephen Park about his journey as an actor, how he suggested changes to his character in Do the Right Thing, and much, much more.