Daniel Dae Kim Fakes His Own Death In 'Butterfly'

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This is Fresh Air.

I'm Terry Gross.

Our guest today is actor Daniel Day Kim.

His first big role was on the TV show Lost.

He was nominated for a Tony earlier this year for starring in the revival of the play Yellowface.

Now he's the star and an executive producer of the new TV series Butterfly on Prime Video.

He spoke with Fresh Airs and Marie Boldonado.

My guest Daniel Day Kim has spent years on television, often playing characters that defy stereotypes.

In a recent piece on Kim, the New York Times says he's become known for characters that are, quote, earnest, serious, enigmatic, dignified.

Now he stars in the new show called Butterfly, playing David Jung, a former spy for the U.S.

who years ago faked his death to protect his young daughter, who he feared was in danger because of his work.

Now it's almost 10 years later and his daughter Rebecca, thinking that her father is dead, has entered the world of espionage as an assassin.

David comes out of hiding to try and save her from that life.

Here's a scene from the first episode of Butterfly.

David has just come face to face with his daughter for the first time since she was a little girl, both with their guns drawn.

You still haven't put your gun down.

Neither of you.

I owe you answers, I know that.

But right now, we have to get out of here.

I'm not going anywhere till you tell me.

No, we have to leave.

Tell me, tell me why you left when I was 14 years old.

Tell me why you made me an orphan.

How could you do that?

How could you you do that?

Everything I did, I did to protect you.

Daniel DeKim is also an executive producer of Butterfly.

Kim became known for playing Jin on the hit show Lost, a role that began with him only speaking Korean, then evolved into becoming one of the show's most nuanced characters.

Kim co-starred on the reboot of Hawaii 5-0 for seven seasons before making headlines for walking away from the the show over a pay equity dispute.

Earlier this year, Kim became the first actor of Asian American descent to receive a Tony nomination in the category of best leading actor in a play for his work in the Broadway revival of the comic satire Yellowface.

He's also producing and creating projects through his company 3AD, which focuses on telling more inclusive stories.

His other shows and movies include The Good Doctor, Raya and the Last Dragon, Always Be My Maybe, Joyride, and the live-action adaptation of Avatar, The Last Airbender.

Daniel Day Kim, welcome to Fresh Air.

I'm so happy to be here.

Let's start with the new show Butterfly.

This series is an action spy thriller, but it's also about dual identity, family dynamics, betrayal.

What drew you to this role?

I think so many things, but

I've always liked action.

I've done it throughout my career.

And you know, I've always found that it helps ground me in scenes and helps my acting work.

And so I love the fact that this was an action series.

But at its heart, it's actually a family relationship drama.

And as a dad, I can tell you that a lot of the scenes between, you know, David, my character, and Rebecca resonated with me because I've made mistakes as a father.

And I've done so with the best of intentions.

But, you know, the trauma that we can leave on our children and the trauma that, you know, is left on us as kids is sometimes something we really have to work hard to get through.

Yeah, the daughter of your character has become an assassin, and your character is scared that she's kind of losing her humanity, that she's too good at being a spy.

And he worried that what he did to her by leaving her for her protection has led.

to the way she is that caused this damage to her.

So that was a part of the story that you related to or that you wanted to sort of delve into?

You know, so many people have family businesses.

Right.

It just so happens that the family business is, you know, espionage.

And, you know, I you know, I think a lot of parents would want a better, easier life for their kids than they had for themselves.

And that was the way I felt going into the relationship with Rebecca.

Yeah, so this is a spy thriller.

I mean, there's all these elements of a family drama, but betrayal, you know, and friendship and relationships.

But it's a spy thriller with a lot of action sequences.

There are shootouts, hand-to-hand combat, car and motorcycle chases.

And I read that you did most of the stunts yourself.

Is that true?

And is that

important to you?

It's true.

And it is important to me.

But I'll also say, you know, I take pride in

being able to shoot a sequence where you can have a close-up of my face, you know, on a bike or, you know, in a hand-to-hand fight.

You know, I can tell when I see stunt doubles doing most of the work for an actor.

And there's nothing wrong with that, of course.

Not every actor enjoys doing stunts, but I do.

So I think it's a win-win when I can do as many as I can.

You said something interesting about how you like to do action because it helps ground you as an actor.

So it's like the physicality of it kind of helps you connect to the character you're playing.

Yeah, I like to be fully activated through my body.

Like sometimes I watch actors perform and there's a disconnect between what their mouth is saying and what their body is telling us through their language and the body language.

And to me, it's important that everything works in synthesis.

And sometimes action helps me do that, especially if there's a lot of

conflict in a scene.

I don't want to manifest that through physical tension, but I do want to feel the stakes of it emotionally.

Well, the whole series takes place in South Korea.

Did you do all your shooting there?

And have you shot other projects in South Korea before?

100% shot in Korea, and I'm really proud of that.

You know, anytime you try to work in a foreign country, there are a lot more variables than there would be if you were working in the States.

But, you know, I love Korea.

You know, I'm familiar with Korea.

And it was nice to be able to show the world the Korea that I know.

And to be honest, we shot in so many locations.

We shot in over 20 cities throughout all of South Korea.

I learned a lot about Korea as well.

We went from

the mountains of Andong in the countryside to the skyscrapers of Seoul and Busan and

so many places in between.

To me,

it's a video postcard for Korea.

Well, one of the episodes is called Busan, which is the city where you were born.

What was it like filming there?

It was so heartwarming.

It was something of a homecoming.

I remember one night we were shooting in a market in a neighborhood where my relatives actually still live.

And

I'd invited 15 of my cousins and aunts and uncles and nephews to come to set.

And the fact that they were sitting behind

the camera, all with their headphones on,

and this being their first experience uh at all of show business in their neighborhood market was uh was a moment i'll never forget because it meant so much to me it was literally the coming together of all of my worlds i would think that like

the entertainment industry when you would have left you know south korea versus now is so different

And like, you know, the feelings that your family would have about entertainment and shooting would be dramatically different, just because the entertainment industry in South Korea has changed so much since

you're absolutely right.

You know,

when my family left Korea, it was still a post-war country.

And not just from the Korean conflict, but also Vietnam.

And so the mentality there was really about survival.

And

the idea of doing something that you love was a luxury.

And that's why there was such an emphasis in my family to be a professional, a doctor or a lawyer, because those were the jobs that provided the most stability.

And you wouldn't have to worry about how you were going to get your next meal.

There is this one line that the daughter character, Rebecca, says, who's she's an assassin, and she says to her dad, you're a spy and a killer.

You can't have this job without screwing up your family.

And this is maybe a silly question, but did you ever wonder if the same thing could be said about being in the entertainment business?

Yes.

In fact, I've seen it.

It's very difficult to have a successful career as an actor and

be a successful parent and

have a loving, close family.

It's something that I've worked really hard in my life to...

to achieve.

And it's why I made certain decisions about my career.

After lost, some of my castmates were going back to L.A.

to pursue opportunities in film.

But one of the main reasons I did Hawaii 5-0 was because it stayed in Hawaii and we didn't have to move.

My kids were in school and they could have the continuity of just

of living their childhood all in one place.

And especially a place as Hawaii is, I wanted to...

prioritize their well-being.

And

it's why

I chose to stay.

Earlier this year, you received a Tony nomination for your lead role in the revival of the play, Yellowface.

The play was written by David Henry Wong, who was the first Asian-American playwright to win a Tony Award for Best Play.

It's a semi-autobiographical comedy that blurs the lines between autobiography and satire.

You play a version of the playwright himself.

The play covers how, in real life, he protested the, quote, yellowface casting of the musical Miss Saigon, where they cast the white actor Jonathan Price in the role of the head Chinese character.

For listeners who don't remember the story of Miss Saigon and how it was cast, would you mind describing what the controversy was?

Like, so Miss Saigon was a Andrew Lloyd Weber

musical that was in London and then moved to Broadway.

And there were issues about who was cast to play the roles of Asians in that musical.

Do you remember

the details?

I do.

You know, Cameron McIntosh is one of the most successful Broadway producers of all time.

And he wanted to make a play centered around the opera Madam Butterfly, and he said it during the Vietnam War.

So at its core, an Asian story, but it tells stories of American GIs and the people of Vietnam.

The central character was someone called the engineer, and he was meant originally to be Asian.

But in in London, Jonathan Price, an actor, by the way, that I respect a great deal.

I think he's an amazing actor, was hired to play this role, even though it was intended to be Asian.

And they changed it to a biracial character.

And then

I guess the icing on the cake was they actually taped his eyelids to make them look more quote-unquote Asian.

And so when they tried to cast it in America, this is when David raised the flag and said, you know, this is an Asian role.

We should hire an Asian actor.

And at that time, no one was speaking up about these kinds of issues the way they are now.

That's why David was so ahead of his time.

And

he lost this battle.

He protested.

The Asian American community protested.

Actors Equity, our union, supported them.

And then when Cameron McIntosh threatened to pull the show and not mount it in New York, the union changed its its mind and allowed Jonathan Price to come in and play the role.

The only concession was he didn't tape his eyelids in New York.

And that's why I think this play is so important, to remind us of the ways that

making us invisible on camera or on stage harms us in our culture because it makes us in some ways dispensable.

Yeah, another moving thing about the play is the fact that it's partially about David Henry Wong's real-life dad, who was an immigrant who moved to the U.S.

and really loved this country.

But he got caught up in an anti-Chinese investigation in the late 90s.

He was a Chinese-American banker who was accused of laundering money for China.

And this is covered in the play too.

And it's also fun.

The play is also funny, but it does have these other deeper issues.

And I want to play a scene from the play.

They captured one of your performances and they were able to broadcast it on PBS, and you can still find it on PBS streaming.

But here, your character, the playwright, the fictionalized version of David Henry Wong, is on the phone with his father, played by Francis Ju, who actually won the Tony Award for Best Performance of an Actor in a Feature Role in a Play for his performance in Yellowface.

Let's listen.

Dad, I'm a little busy right now.

Doing what?

Trying to write a new play.

Good idea.

What's that supposed to mean?

I said it was a good idea.

It's only been three years since I'm butterfly.

But you've been smart.

Keeping your name in the newspapers.

That's good, son.

You mean all that Missaigon stuff?

Thank God it's finally starting to die down.

But so many articles on you, free publicity.

But everyone disagreed with me.

Everyone.

All the big shot guys.

Dick Cavett, Ed Kutch, here, wait, this one, my favorite.

You saved the articles?

I am ashamed of my union actors equity.

Oh, yeah, Charlton Heston.

When I was working in a laundry, could I ever have dreamed that one day Charlton Heston would write about my son?

I'm telling you, this is a land of opportunity.

That's a scene from the play play Yellowface, which was recorded and broadcast by PBS as part of the Great Performances series.

This scene is great because it shows how devoted the playwright's dad is to the U.S.

And what the father story brings up is, like you were saying, another theme of the play, the idea that Asian Americans, that immigrants in general, are perpetual foreigners.

in this country, that they're always seen as not American when, even when they're super devoted.

And David Henry Wong's dad story really kind of speaks to this, how he kind of got targeted because he was a Chinese-American banker, wrongfully targeted.

Aaron Powell, you know, it harkens back to, you know, World War II, when Japanese Americans were incarcerated.

Japanese American citizens were incarcerated because

America thought that because they were Japanese, that their loyalties would lie with Japan instead of America.

You know, and we didn't see this.

You know, it's the same thing that's happening, you know, with the Muslim community, you know,

after 9-11.

And so this idea that somehow, because you look a certain way, you must not be American is something that I think we're smart enough to move beyond.

It's a much more nuanced conversation than that.

Yeah, that

your allegiances

are divided or something.

Yeah.

I think the other thing that this show brings up as far as the representation part is that it's often a lose-lose situation.

Like in the play, the playwright criticizes the show Miss Aigon for using a white actor to play the lead role, even with putting tape on his eyes.

But then people get mad at him because they threaten to cancel Miss Saigon, thus depriving tons of other Asian American actors from having a job.

There's this tension like you can't win.

Is Is this something that you've felt in your own career?

Like that tension?

Yes.

I've been very conscious of that very question.

Anytime I'm offered a role or I win a role,

I often think about what the consequences of representation are for that character.

And it's a layer of consideration I wish I didn't have to have because I would like to be free enough as an artist to be able to play any character that's interesting to me.

And I think when we talk about representation, that's ultimately what we want.

It's not about, you know, that we never want to play nerds or drug dealers or, you know, women play geishas.

It's not that.

It's that there's such a dearth of the other characters that we only get seen as those one things.

But if we can play all of humanity, all of the kind of colors on the spectrum of humanity, that's the goal.

And

until we get there, though, we have to focus on the way that certain ideas of us have diminished who we are.

Yeah, the play reminded me of that term rep sweats, you know,

which is coined by comedian Jenny Yang a couple years ago.

It's used to describe kind of the pressure that underrepresented groups sort of feel themselves on.

You know, the anxiety that if there are so few representations of a certain group,

that those few representations are then so important.

Like they have to be positive or they have to be successful or then in the future, they might not get greenlit or they might not, you know, become successful and then they won't make another version or another project

because of that.

Yeah,

when I started Lost, my biggest fear was that the show would get canceled after the pilot.

And obviously every actor fears that, you know, if they're in a a job they love, but I feared it because the character of Jin in the pilot was not a likable character and played into some stereotypes that I'd been trying to avoid for most of my career.

And

had he not had the opportunity to grow the way he did through the series, I thought that I would be doing my community a disservice.

And so those were the rep sweats I was going through.

Thankfully, you know, the creators of the show were not only incredible storytellers, but very conscious of this issue, and they worked hard to make sure that not only Jin, but every character was made three-dimensional, and what you saw was not what you got necessarily.

That's actor Daniel Day Kim speaking with Fresh Air's Anne Marie Boldonado.

His new spy series, Butterfly, premieres today on Prime Video.

We'll hear more of their conversation after a break.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.

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I want to go back a bit to your childhood.

You were born in South Korea and moved to the U.S.

when you were around a year old, I think.

Can you describe where you grew up?

Sure.

My family and I started in New York and the Bronx and then Long Island and then

moved to Pennsylvania, to the Lehigh Valley.

I spent part of my childhood in Easton and then in junior high school we moved school districts, even though it was only five miles away to Bethlehem.

So I did my high school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

And this, I mean, not recently, but these were kind of steel towns in Pennsylvania.

Aaron Powell, Bethlehem Steel, you might remember, was the number two steel maker in the world in the 70s and the 80s.

And we happened to move there

right at the time of the decline of the American steel industry.

And I think about the timing of that because

that was also right around the time of the murder of Vincent Chin.

Can you remind people of that incident and the aftermath?

Vinci Chin

lived in Detroit, and it was during the time that the American auto industry was failing,

and Japanese cars were emerging as market leaders.

And a lot of American auto workers were out of work and recently unemployed.

So there was a lot of anti-Asian sentiment at that time.

They would take Japanese cars and destroy them.

And

anyone who looked Asian was in danger.

Vincent Chin

was

celebrating his bachelor party at a club and he, though he's Chinese, was mistaken for someone Japanese and he was beaten to death by two out-of-work auto workers.

And those two auto workers, though they murdered him, never served a day in prison because the judge said, these are not the kind of men you put in jail.

You've been very vocal about fighting violence directed at the Asian American community, specifically during the COVID pandemic.

You even spoke in front of Congress about it.

You also have a personal experience with this, with members of your family being targeted.

The fact that people who have lived here for generations were called the source of the China virus and exacerbated by politicians who were not very forward-thinking

is something that we still experience and we experience during COVID.

You know,

my heart broke so many days in a row when I would see incident after incident of elderly Asian people being attacked simply for what they look like.

And

it's something I do have personal experience with because my sister was hit by a car by someone who drove up onto the sidewalk.

to hit her and then called her racial slurs after hitting her.

And the justice system in her case failed her miserably.

So I know firsthand the ways that we are silenced and the ways that our experiences are somehow considered second class.

When did you realize that you wanted to be a performer?

I think I had my first

inkling of wanting to perform as a young kid, maybe

nine or ten,

because I remember getting

I've never told this story before, I remember getting into a fight with my dad, and I was upstairs in my room, I was crying, and I thought, wow, this would make a great story.

And so

it started then, but I never really thought of it, you know, as a legitimate career choice because

from a young age, it was always kind of told to me that I should become a doctor or a lawyer.

And so,

you know, or an engineer.

But it wasn't until college where I was at a small liberal arts school called Haverford where the school was small enough where there were no barriers to entry to anything you wanted to study.

And I decided that I would take an acting class as an elective, and that changed the course of my life.

I think the theater program that you were part of in college was kind of experimental.

Can you describe what it was like and what you found so exciting about it?

The kind of drama we were studying there wasn't kitchen sink, Neil Simon kind of plays.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I love that too.

But we were working

with experimental playwrights, Arthaud, Beckett, Jenet, Brecht.

And I love that so much because it gave me a different angle into entertainment and storytelling.

And it also is very political in nature.

Did your parents come to see any of your plays during college?

They did.

They did.

They did not understand them.

Even my friends who came to see the shows,

my classmates, didn't understand the plays because everyone was used to, you know, cats and Phantom of the Opera.

And this was not that.

But I'll never forget one time that my parents came to see me do a play at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center.

During my junior year when most people were going abroad to Europe,

I chose to spend the semester at the O'Neill Center at this program for young actors called the National Theater Institute or NTI.

And it was my first real experience doing

naturalistic theater, Tennessee Williams.

And one of the plays we did was The Trojan Women.

And I played Poseidon.

And we did a site-specific version of Trojan Women where we were out on a beach and I was on a rock and I was in a loincloth made of seaweed.

I was holding this big wooden staff and my big line, my intro line was, I am Poseidon, God of the seas.

And I don't know if you know this, but Connecticut in January is like 20 degrees outside.

So I'm freezing.

My parents are up there and they're thinking, they told me

they were thinking, you must really be dedicated to this if you're willing to freeze your buns off in Connecticut for theater.

And so that was one of the first times they saw me perform.

Let's take a short break and then we'll talk some more.

My guest is Daniel Day Kim.

He's the star and executive producer of the new spy thriller TV series Butterfly.

It premieres today on Prime Video.

Earlier this year, he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role in the revival of the comedic play Yellowface.

More after a break.

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One of your biggest roles was on the ABC show Lost.

That was a huge hit.

You played Jin, one of the people who ended up on the island after a plane crash.

You were one of the main characters.

I read that you almost had to turn down the role because of scheduling.

I had just been offered the role

of a photographer who was also a cave diver in a movie that shot in Romania called The Cave.

I had literally just been offered that role and

the audition for Lost came up.

And

there was some question as to whether or not I was going to be able to do both.

And it looked bad for a long time.

My agent at the time told me, well, just audition, let's see what happens.

And as it turned out, I got lost.

And then I got the scheduling for the movie.

And it looked like I wasn't going to be able to do both.

So

this is one of the many, many reasons I love J.J.

Abrams.

I wrote JJ personally and I said, JJ,

I love this show.

I would love to be a part of it.

This is my problem.

This is my dilemma.

Can you help?

And he switched around the shooting schedule of the pilot so that I could fly back from Romania and be a part of Lost.

You said at the beginning of Jin's trajectory, the character embodied a lot of stereotypes that you had worked so hard to avoid.

But Jin does change over time.

He becomes a better man, a better husband.

So did you have to fight for those changes?

Yes.

I did.

As did the actors who played my wife, Yoon Jin Kim.

We talked about it a lot and we talked to the producers a lot.

We were also aided in the writer's room because we had a couple of writers who were either Asian American or had experience with friends and family who were Asian American.

So they were our advocates in the room and I'm forever grateful to them because sometimes it doesn't matter what happens 2,000 miles away in Hawaii when you're writing a show in Los Angeles.

It's a very separate process.

So

I'm grateful to people like Monica Meser, Christina Kim, who were in that room and advocating for our characters.

How would you describe Jin from that pilot episode?

Yeah, I would say Jin was overbearing, domineering.

He subjugated his

And I think those were things that we'd seen in media before.

It's the whole Madam Butterfly thing.

And those were things that I wasn't interested in playing.

And in fact, Jin was supposed to be killed off in season one.

That's how disposable he was.

I want to play a scene from Lost.

This totally tragic scene is of your character dying with his wife's son, played by Yoon Jin Kim.

Here, the two of you are trying to escape the island in a submarine, but there's an explosion and you realize you can't escape, so you stay together.

You have to go!

No,

I can do this!

No!

No, you can't.

Please go!

I won't leave you.

I want to get you out of here.

Please go

I love you, son.

I love you.

That's a scene from the series finale of Lost.

Have you heard that scene in a while?

Michael Jacquino's score

gets me every time.

That music is so moving.

You know,

I find myself kind of emotionally taken right back to when we were shooting.

Oh, that was,

that scene when it played in the episode.

I don't know if we needed to give a spoiler alert for

a decades-old show,

but that scene when it played back, was so heartbreaking for all of the loyal

lost watchers.

But to me,

thinking about that scene and the fact that viewers were emotionally affected by it speaks to how far that character came.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

He changed the most.

He had the most growth.

I think that's true.

On social media, this is a while ago now.

You wrote that the fact that you died in so many shows on screen was starting to upset your kids.

How did you come to that realization?

And why was that?

What was the problem for them?

That's so sad.

Well, you know,

I've heard a lot of my friends who are African-American say, well, you know, you know, in the movies, a black man's always the first to die, you know, and I think there's some truth to that.

And, but it was, it was very similar for Asian people.

Like, we were always the first to die.

In fact, you know, in the cave, I'm one of the first to die.

And it was happening so often in my career that

when I would get an offer, I would talk to my kids and family and tell them all about it.

The first question they would ask me was, do you die?

And that's when I knew I should take a look at this phenomenon.

It also made me realize the impact that my work was having on my kids

and

the perceptions they were taking away from the characters I was playing and what they represented.

So it wasn't just representation with a capital R in the society.

It was representation in my own family and how I was level setting their hopes and dreams inadvertently through my work.

You've spoken in the past about how long it took for you to play romantic leads or even characters with full names and emotional arcs.

Do you think things have changed?

I do.

I really do think things have changed.

For the positive, when you look at movies like Crazy Rich Asians and you see a romantic comedy that centers Asian Americans, it's something that could not have been done when I started my career.

Just could not.

I can't imagine any studio executive saying like, that sounds like a moneymaker.

So

we have made progress.

And when you see TV shows like Squid Game, or Beef, you know, we're seeing representation on a much more sophisticated level than we ever have.

There are more actors of Asian descent who are working today than there ever have been.

And so these are like unquestionable signs of progress that we have to note and appreciate.

But I still haven't played a romantic lead.

And I've been doing this for 30 years.

I don't, it's been a goal of mine since I started, but I just can't seem to get cast as

someone who gets the girl.

I feel like you often have fun with your image.

You've done some funny cameos in films.

I'm thinking about movies like Joyride and Always Be My Maybe, starring Ali Wong and Randall Park.

That's a romantic comedy.

I want to play a clip from that film where you play a famous restaurateur who's engaged to the celebrity chef played by Ali Wong.

And at one point, Allie Wong's character calls you, quote, a sexy, handsome, chiseled statue of Korean Eric from the Little Mermaid.

That's her quote.

Um, you're kind of a douche.

And in this scene, you're telling Ali's character that you want to slow the relationship down.

I've been thinking about this a lot, and if it's cool with you, I'd like to postpone the wedding.

It's not that I don't want to get married, I do.

It's just that this opportunity has come up for me to go to India with Jose Andres.

The chef from Bazaar?

Exactly.

He's opening up a new restaurant there, and he knows about my two years in the saffron fields of Kashmir with Alice Waters.

So, you want me to go to San Francisco alone?

That's the beauty of it.

We'd both be in new surroundings.

We'd be apart

together.

Before entering into a lifelong commitment,

I just want this to be right.

So that when we do get married, he'll be the best husband he can be.

So, in that sense, it's really for the both of us.

What a douche.

That's a scene from the 2019 Netflix film, Always Be My Maybe.

Do you like to play around with your leading man image?

I really enjoy it

because I love comedy.

You know, Yellowface,

as we discussed, I was really attracted to because it's funny.

And so often, people don't think of me that way.

And, you know, I...

I'll do anything that is interesting, as we've discussed before.

I want to play every kind of role, every kind of character, and I'll poke fun at myself in a heartbeat if I like the project and the people I'm working with.

Daniel Day Kim, thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, thank you.

It's been a pleasure.

Daniel Day Kim's new TV series, Butterfly, premieres today on Prime Video.

He spoke with Fresh Air's Anne Maria Bodonaro.

Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the 100th anniversary edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Luce.

This is Fresh Air.

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As an actor and screenwriter, Anita Luce was a pioneering figure.

At the age of 25, she became the first female staff screenwriter in early Hollywood.

Luce is also known for writing the novel that would become the classic Hollywood musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Our book critic Maureen Corrigan takes a look at the novel, which turns 100 this year.

1925 was a very good year for American literature.

in fact, probably the best ever.

The Great Gatsby was published that year, and so was Hemingway's In Our Time, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, L.

N.

Locke's landmark Harlem Renaissance anthology, The New Negro, and Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

There's also Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy, Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, and I'll Stop There, except to say that the New Yorker magazine was also founded in 1925.

Amidst all these heavyweights, it's easy to overlook a cheeky little comic novel.

But in 1925, Anita Luce was the author, laughing all the way to the bank.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a tale of two flappers on the prowl for sugar daddies bearing diamonds, was a runaway bestseller, translated into over 13 languages, made into a stage play and a silent film, now lost.

In 1953, Luce's novel was updated and reimagined as a musical, starring Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee, the blondest blonde of them all, and Jane Russell as her snappy brunette sidekick, Dorothy.

I have only seen the film, so the novel, newly reissued as a modern library paperback, was a revelation to me.

Think the zany surrealism of the Marx brothers crossed with the desire, both sexual and material, of sex in the city.

No wonder James Joyce was one of the novel's many highbrow modernist fans.

Luce wrote gentlemen prefer blondes in the form of diary entries written by Laura Lai.

There's not one continuous plot here, so much as there are dozens of vignettes, lots of them satirizing social issues like prohibition and censorship.

Here, for instance, is Lorelei's description of one of her many suitors, a reformer named Mr.

Spufford.

She tells us,

Mr.

Spufford spends all of his time looking at things that spoil people's morals.

So Mr.

Spufford really must have very, very strong morals, or else all the things that spoil other people's morals would spoil his morals.

So I told Mr.

Spufford that I thought that civilization is not what it ought to be, and we really ought to have something else to take its place.

Is Lorelei truly naive or faux?

Reading gentlemen prefer blondes is like listening to a Gracie Allen skit on old time radio.

The surface humor derives from how hare-brained Gracie, like Lorelei, seems to be.

But perhaps the joke is really on anyone who dismisses either of them as just another dizzy dame.

Courtesy of their male admirers, Lorelei and the more obviously shrewder Dorothy dine out at swank Manhattan joints like the colony and trocadero and accept tributes of champagne and square-cut diamond bracelets.

Early in her diary, Lorelei tells us that she's decided to flee to Paris with Dorothy in tow, in order to improve my writing and avoid marriage to an author, where he is the whole thing, and all I would be is the wife.

A train excursion to Vienna follows, that sets the stage for one of the weirdest encounters in all literature.

An overwrought Lorelei's session with Dr.

Freud, spelled in her diary as F-R-O-Y-D.

Here's a snippet from that session.

So Dr.

Freud and I had quite a long talk in the English language.

So it seems that everybody seems to have a thing called inhibitions, which is when you want to do a thing and you do not do it.

So then you dream about it instead.

So Dr.

Freud asked me what I seem to dream about.

So I told him that I never really dream about anything.

I mean, I use my brain so much in the daytime that at night they do not seem to do anything else but rest.

So then Dr.

Freud said that all I needed was to cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep.

Case closed.

Edith Wharton, who was another famous fan of gentlemen prefer blondes, declared that it was the great American novel.

I wouldn't go that far, but in this retro era of cottage corps, trad wives, and puff sleeves, prairie dresses galore, how fun it is to travel back to the dawn of the modern age and revel in the giddy freedoms of flapperdom.

Marine Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University.

She reviewed the 100th anniversary edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Luce.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, my guest will be Jeff Hiller.

He's nominated for an Emmy for his performance in the HBO series Somebody Somewhere as Joel, the main character's best friend, who runs a secret nighttime cabaret at his church for his LGBTQ friends.

Jeff Hiller originally felt called to be a pastor, but in his church, being gay was a pretty major obstacle.

I hope you'll join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.

Our co-host is Tanya Mosley.

I'm Terry Gross.

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Men grow cold as girls grow old and we all lose our charms in the end.

But square cut or pear shape, these rocks don't lose their shape.

Diamonds are a girl's best friend.

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