A Surprise TV Star Embraces His Geeky Side
By SUSAN STEWART
Published: December 4, 2006
Today viewers may know Masi Oka as impish, innocent, time-traveling Hiro Nakamura on the new NBC Monday-night drama “Heroes.” But a few years ago he was in a different line of work, one in which, among other things, he drowned George Clooney.
“I virtually drowned him,” Mr. Oka corrected, referring to his work on the 2000 movie “The Perfect Storm.” As a digital-effects artist with George Lucas’s company, Industrial Light and Magic, one of his tasks was to create the computer models for what became giant waves on screen.
Over breakfast recently at the SoHo Grand Hotel, Mr. Oka tried to explain how he did it. Picking up a pepper shaker, he asked, “If I was to recreate a model of this on computers, how would I do it?” He then went on to explain various ways to model objects: polygonal, in which large numbers of straight lines describe curves; NURBS, which stands for “nonuniform rational b-spline surfaces”; and SUBD surfaces, by which time he had totally lost his audience.
“I’m sorry I’m geeking out here,” he said.
Geeking out comes naturally to Mr. Oka, 31, who made the cover of Time magazine at the age of 10 as one of a group of “Asian-American whiz kids” and graduated from Brown University as a math and computer science major, with a minor in theater.
The two pursuits were not, at least to Mr. Oka, as far apart as they seemed. “I’ve always loved using both the left and right sides of my brain,” Mr. Oka said. “Computer programming is about looking for solutions to problems. So is acting. There is a science to comedy.”
Mr. Oka has an I.Q of 180. He said he was sorry that number was ever published — as it was recently in Entertainment Weekly — and then explained the inadequacy of I.Q. as a predictor of adult intelligence. (“Its natural tendency is to find its limit and homogenize toward 100.”)
Oops. Geeking out again. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Oka is single.
“I still haven’t found my soul mate per se,” he said. “I’ll tell you that I have some feelers out there, but it’s so hard, working in this environment.”
His friends, including the “Heroes” crew — “My makeup and hair folks, they’re looking out for me” — are pitching in as would-be matchmakers, as is his co-star Milo Ventimiglia, who, like Mr. Oka, plays a once-ordinary person who has developed extraordinary powers. Mr. Ventimiglia’s character can fly, and Mr. Oka’s can relocate from Tokyo to Times Square in a heartbeat. Off screen, the two actors hang out.
“We don’t really party-party, but we definitely go to bars,” Mr. Oka said, adding that Mr. Ventimiglia was his mentor in that setting. “Oh, definitely, I’ve learned a lot. It’s quite an art form, watching Milo work.”
With about 14 million viewers a week “Heroes” is one of the season’s few certifiable hits. And Hiro is the show’s most recognizable character, partly because, while the other heroes are tortured by their powers, Hiro revels in his.
“Hiro is a kid,” Mr. Oka said. “He’s the kid that we all once were. He has to lose his innocence and naïveté as he grows in the show.”
That may happen in January, when the show resumes after an initial 10-episode run that ends tonight. In the fall “Heroes” viewers caught a glimpse of a future version of Hiro, sporting a soul patch, a Samurai sword and a mature sensibility. But for now, when Hiro scrunches up his round face and stops time (often to win poker games), it’s a funny moment, not a dramatic one.
Mr. Oka, who moved from Tokyo to Los Angeles with his mother when he was 6, does his own translating on the show (Hiro often speaks in Japanese with subtitles) and makes sure the Japanese phrases are up to date. The danger is that in playing a comical Asian male, he is feeding an old stereotype.
“I guess it’s fact that you’ve rarely seen an Asian guy as a romantic lead,” he said. “That’s for a Brad Pitt or a John Cusack. For me, though, I just try to keep it as authentic as possible. I must say it’s a big challenge to find that fine line between realistic, grounded comedy, yet keep him growing.”
Technically, Mr. Oka, who has played a number of modest roles in television sitcoms, said he had learned from the form how to create funny characters by repeating particular gestures. “Repetition is funny because it’s a character tag,” he said.
In Hiro’s case the tag is a stiff-armed victory salute, accompanied by an exultant shout.
“Part of the comedy is he really believes in what he does, Mr. Oka said. “As long as that point of view’s in there, you’ll always have that comedy, grounded in truth.”
Another truth is that Mr. Oka is enjoying his new celebrity as much as Hiro enjoys his superpowers. After all, for an actor who still drives a 2000 Honda Accord and whose best-known role had been as Franklyn the lab technician on NBC’s “Scrubs,” stardom is a big change.
“My agent read the script and said, ‘My God, I’ve found the role,’ ” Mr. Oka said. “I mean, how many actors are fluent in Japanese, well-trained in comedy and have abundant American TV experience? I felt pretty good going in. I felt like, wow, my niche market. It was like, if this isn’t it, what is?”
