Gay Norfolk

We had talked previously with lead Antony Starr and one of the more interesting components to his character, Lucas Hood, is his relationship with Job, played with tip-to-tail finesse by Hoon Lee . Whereas Hood oozes masculinity and tends to start a fight and then ask questions later, Job is a blend of sophistication, smarts, snark and also happens to sport the most fabulous make-up and clothes. In our chat with Lee earlier this week, we touched on what makes Job tick, his emotional connection to Hood is and, of course, how do you label a character who seems to be such an eclectic blend of everything?

AfterElton: Let s back up to when you were auditioning for the role. Was it all attitude or were you in full Job clothing? Hoon Lee: You're only given a certain amount of time to prepare and I thought I would just try to access him through the entry points where I felt most comfortable, where I had some fluency already, and one of those was the technical side, which is computer hacker, and I have something of a technical background.

And then I thought that the scene that I had to do, which was actually the audition piece with the diner scene, that there was a real strength there and a real aggression, and these were things I knew I could access. So rather than kind of trying to create a full-blown entity, I tried to come to grip with the parts that I felt I could do well and kind of play to that, and then have fun with the rest of it. Just really try to use it as an opportunity to try things I haven't tried before.

And that ended up working out well. If Job shows up in your small town diner, best thing to do is RUN! AE: When I talked to Antony, he saw the Job/Hood relationship as more brotherly than anything else.

What's your take? HL: I think that it's like any sort of family relationship where the intensity of the love and affection can often lead you to behavior that isn't necessarily the most conducive to love and affection. Antony's character is a very impulsive person.

And Job is someone who, by his trade, is about trying to see the big picture and control things. There's a dynamic there that is really predicated on a lot of love but they're fundamentally different styles. And that's partly why they work well together, because they can be complementary.

Very complementary. I happen to have some insight into their back story from the writers, which I think is actually a beautiful back story, and I hope it comes to light at some point, and I'm not really at liberty to talk about it, but I will say that the amount of loyalty that Job feels for Antony's character is extremely intense, and that's been very, very helpful for me as an actor to know. AE: Can you define Job's sexuality for me because in different pieces I've seen him referred to as transgender or transvestite and then a drag queen...

HL: That's an interesting question. My understanding of Job, and this is my understanding because the reality is all of these characters to some degree are still evolving I think that's been a huge advantage to the freedom that Cinemax was given and the sort of collaborative nature that Greg Yaitanes, Exec Producer and Jonathan Schickler, EP have volunteered to engage with the actors in. It's just this idea that we're all kind of making this world together.

That's my huge caveat to what I'm about to say. I feel like, for Job, the whole idea of figuring out the label of who he is and every aspect of that is something he's not interested in. And that Job as a character, as a person, is somebody who is in a constant state of evaluation and evolution.

And that's partly why his look and presentation keeps changing. And this is something that we've thought about in terms of sort of a guiding light for his styling and his presentation in general, but it's been fueled by larger thoughts about who this person might be. As I said before, part of how I understand this person and part of how I feel he's different from characters before that I've seen that may have been transgender or have been transvestites or have been cross-dressers or anything along that gradient is technical awareness and what's interesting to me about that is that in the online world, the technical world that we live in now, identity itself is constantly in flux.

And to me, that's central to who he is, because to be a hacker at his level or a hacker at his level means that you have to live in that world he's kind of an explicit shape-changer.

The man that puts the swagger and sass in Job is actor Hoon Lee Continue reading →