Photo: nelson huang
Joel Kim Boosteris quickly establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s most exciting jack of all trades.
“2022 was probably the best year of my entire life,” the 35-year-old tells PEOPLE. “It was a decade-plus of work that I put in and it was really an amazing experience to see it all come to fruition.”
With that success has come a bigger audience and, as a result, higher expectations to continue a certain level of quality to his work.
“2023 has been much more of laying the groundwork,” he adds. “It’s a really scary, daunting thing to be sort of told that you are now representing an entire community of people and I represent a couple of different communities, and I definitely am feeling that pressure more acutely than I have in the past.”
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Joel Kim Booster wrote, produced, and starrs in the Hulu romantic comedy “Fire Island”.Jeong Park / © Searchlight Pictures / Courtesy Everett
Booster’s long road to success in the entertainment industry taught him that he has to create his own opportunities instead of waiting for Hollywood’s calls.
“The most interesting projects that I’m working on right now are still the stuff that I’m writing for myself and self-generating,” he admits. “I am a gay Asian man and I wear those identities on my sleeve, and I still don’t know if the industry quite knows what to do with me.”
The funnyman “waited around for years” for fully-realized parts to come around and, despite his recent accomplishments, he is “still doing the work” on crafting things for himself.
“I’m taking shows out of my own and trying to write my next movie,” he explains. “I haven’t been offered a Marvel movie; it hasn’t blasted me into the stratosphere as much as I would have loved. I’m still a workhorse, so I’m still having to sort of keep my head down and do the work for myself.”
Thankfully, the multi-hyphanete “wants to continue to do work that sort of challenges me in all of those areas at once” and actually enjoys doing it all.“I’m very lucky that people are interested in what I want to write and I think I’m very lucky that I’m a decent enough performer that I can pull it off,” he says, noting that he hopes to one day have a television show of his own.
“I want to be the next Issa Rae, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lena Dunham,” he continues. “Being a writer, producer, star on my own show has always been my goal and I’m really working toward making that a reality because I think I have skill sets to do it all and I want to make good on that.”
“I think because we all know each other now so well and we really understand the specific comedic voices of every character, the writers do a lot to shake things up,” he says about the streaming hit. “It’s been really fun to really dig a little bit deeper into some relationships that we didn’t get to see in season one.”
The Plainfield, Illinois-raised star also “can’t say enough good things about playing off a titan like Maya Rudolph, calling every day on set “a masterclass in comedy performance.” He adds, “It’s really fun to sit back and watch her work, and then try to absorb as much of the confidence that she has and apply it to your own performance.”
Jeong Park/Searchlight Pictures
And while his work as a standup and on hit comedy series likeThe Other Two,Big Mouth, ShrillandSearch Partyis what initially garnered him attention, Booster hopes to flex his more dramatic muscles at some point.
“I was studying Shakespeare in theater school and wanted to be a very ‘Capital S’ serious actor,” he says about starting as a performer. “I did a lot of dramatic work as a theater actor in Chicago when I got out of school before starting stand up. You have all these plans for yourself and then life takes you in a completely different direction and you sort of ride the wave.”
source: people.com
