talented people:
Everybody Loves Rex
By Audrey Shiomi
Contrary to popular notion, Rex Lee is not Lloyd, the bubbly office assistant on HBO’s hit series Entourage, executive produced by Mark Wahlberg and revolving around the day-to-day life of a hot young actor, his entourage of childhood buddies, and his high-powered agent. Aside from the fact that on any given weekend both Lloyd and Lee prefer Boys Town to Sunset Boulevard — they’re both openly gay — the similarities seem to taper off from there. Lee is not his indefatigable alter ego; he’s susceptible to both good days and bad. Sitting down for lunch at Le Pain Quotidien in West Hollywood, it seems he’s having a particularly unsettling day, suffering the pangs of last night’s questionable dinner…
Who’s Laughing Now?
By Audrey Shiomi
Don’t be offended if you should get stood up by Russell Peters. It’s not that he doesn’t care about scheduled meetings with reporters; he was just too distracted by fast cars to show up. Though as I sat for an hour in a Starbucks parking lot, dialing and redialing, only to get his machine, it was hard not to take it personally. The nerve of this guy, skipping an interview to buy a car…
Better Luck May Come Tomorrow
By Audrey Shiomi
When you’re one of only two Asian kids at a small Georgia town school, you’re bound to take a beating. That’s a sign of normalcy for Sung Kang, who saw red whenever he was shoved to the ground for looking like a “chink”…
G33K Speak
By Audrey Shiomi
Young Masi Oka was never good at making friends. On top of speaking little English, he was a painfully shy kid. It all began to change when Oka was asked to perform a comedic monologue before his classmates…
Far From Ordinary
By Audrey Shiomi
Rinko Kikuchi turned heads along the red carpet at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Wrapped in a lilac kimono with bamboo imprints, her pure-white complexion contrasted starkly with the fiery orange tuft of hair atop her head which, more than anything, looked like an avant-garde take on Mr. T’s mohawk…
Top of the Pop
By Audrey Shiomi
At a quaint Sherman Oaks residence, music producer and composer Joey Carbone turns up his speakers for a lesson in J-pop musicology…
Girl on a Mission
By Audrey Shiomi
Stumble into the dojo of a Hong Kong film studio and you’re likely to find this diminutive beauty hanging from a rope as a man with an unrelenting fist delivers punches at every angle from below. It might seem like torture, but for action star Maggie Q it’s all in a day’s work…