Yes, but no one calls the big blue boyscout a detective, that’s his rich best friend’s shtick.
Also note that as westerners, lumping all asians together is very insulting to asians. When the movie the Last Geisha came out, there were protests because the two main Japanese characters were portrayed by a Chinese and Malay actress on a fake Japanese village built in California where everybody spoke English.
Sure, but none of 'em seem unambiguously of Asian ancestry as per the OP. Cain does roles that I’d figure are supposed to be (a guy named Kimo, a guy named Murakami), and also cops (at least three sheriffs!) – but I’m not sure they ever overlapped; I can’t flatly say Detective Tony Moran or Detective Mason Danvers aren’t as white as police lieutenant Cornelius Morgan sounds, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Incidentally, Dean Cain was born Dean Tanaka . . . which brings me to the IMDB entry for DEAD END: “There’s been another school shooting and the killer is at large. Reporter Tina Tanaka makes it her mission to find the killer” . . . which may or may not qualify, sure as the actress playing Tina Tanaka in DEAD END and DEAD END 2 and DEAD END 3 is Shalema Meszaro, who seems to be of Hawaiian ancestry.
But I’m not sure.
But for purposes of bumping the thread, I’ll note that Detective James Tanaka is played in all three movies by Larry Kitagawa – who also played FBI Agent Jack Fong a bunch of times, but that’s a whole 'nother thing.
At that, Nick Sakai played a Detective Tanaka on LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT. Just guessing here, but I figure it’s because De-Tec-Tive-Ta-Na-Ka is fun to say.
And at the other end of the spectrum, there’s Detective James Ward, on episode after episode of RIZZOLI & ISLES – who’s played by Chase Kim, who’d previously played Detective Kim on episode after episode of MOONLIGHT; Kim’s roles on other shows run the gamut from a Secret Service agent to an FBI Forensics Tech to – sonofabitch, Detective Kim again! Man, what are the odds?
I can’t really see how your googling trumps my authortative post about jackie chan other than to make yourself feel better.
I could have put up, like yourself, piddling examples of asian americans in small roles. but i didn’t. you shouldn’t either.
When did you make an authoritative post about Jackie Chan?
(That’s not snark; I genuinely don’t see one. I mean, I see your post about Dean Cain, who as far as I know has never done a movie with Jackie Chan; and I see your post about THE LAST GEISHA, which as far as I know didn’t feature Jackie Chan; so unless you’re outing yourself as a sock puppet for Toy’varen, I’m kind of at a loss.
But is it up to me? After I mentioned Philip Ahn playing Police Chief Henry Nakamura on THE FBI, the OP popped in to confirm that my post was relevant to the thread. And that was after bordelond mentioned the sixth-billed guy on GRIMM, along with the guy in BLACK RAIN who was neither Michael Douglas nor Andy Garcia, which prompted the OP to assure him that “No, they’re relevant.”
Obviously we could stick to top-billed folks, which I guess runs from Sammo Hung to Kristin Kreuk to Jet Li to Keye Luke to Pat Morita to Irene Ng to Maggie Q to Don Wilson to Russell Wong to Jason Yee to David Yip to Chow Yun-Fat, plus a whole lotta Jackie Chan, plus arguably Bruce Lee and Toshiro Mifune, plus whoever else we add on as the thread continues. But (a) then we lose the posts that came in before I even got here – Jack Soo as Detective Yemena on BARNEY MILLER, Tim Kang as Detective Cho on THE MENTALIST, Kwan Hi Lim as Lieutenant Tanaka on MAGNUM PI, Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park and Kam Fong on HAWAII FIVE-O, and so on; and (b) all just to apparently go against the OP’s declarations of relevance?
Until I hear otherwise from the OP – ‘no one less than sixth-billed in the cast of a movie or a TV show,’ say – I figure I kinda gotta defer to said OP.
I gotta tell ya, this is putting me in kind of a weird place.
So here I was, trying to figure out whether Jadyn Wong counts for SCORPION – you know, that TV series where a team of four geniuses are called in whenever the guys at Homeland Security can’t get the job done? So our heroes keep getting tasked with finding stolen weapons, or locating a stealth aircraft that went missing, or tracking down a hacker or a bomber, or sleuthing a kidnapping or proving the innocence of a prisoner, and so on and so forth, forever and ever, amen?
Anyhow, I figure it passes the Superhal test, since I don’t figure it’s a small role; she’s in every episode, and it’s pretty much an ensemble-cast thing. And I figured the OP would figure that would count, since the thing said main-character castmembers are playing at is, y’know, (a) investigating the occasional murder, or searching for a mole at the CIA; and, of course, (b) all the stuff I’d already mentioned.
But while I was never 100% sure before, I’m twice as unsure now.
It’s a danged mystery, is what it is.
Be that as it may, I figure this one should pass muster: Jun Sung Kim as James Park, in Innocent Blood. IMDB says he’s top-billed, sure as “James Park, a retired undercover detective, faces his worst nightmare when his young son Cody is kidnapped by a mysterious criminal connected to his dark past.”
So he gets the usual Don’t Go To The Police imperative, and so – here, I’ll just quote the movie review: “The cop-turned-professor will have to revert to his old ways when his young son is kidnapped by a mystery man with revenge on his unhinged mind”.
Kim was also top-billed in Forgotten as FBI Agent Henry Joh, noting an inconsistency and making a key deduction in time to stop a murder and earn a promotion.
Aya Sumika is of Japanese and Hawaiian ancestry, and spent over three years playing a special agent with the FBI’s Organized Crime unit on NUMB3RS; she’s the one who trained under Rob Morrow’s character at Quantico, and then worked alongside him to such good effect that she eventually got offered the promotion to Supervisor.
Mako was a castmember on HAWAIIAN HEAT, as the gruff and gun-toting boss to a couple of long-suffering members of the Chicago PD who’d one day up and decided, hey, why don’t we go to Hawaii and be fish-out-of-water detectives? I mean, so long as we’re going to get ordered around by somebody, then why the heck shouldn’t it be Major Taro Oshira of the Honolulu Police Department?
Mako was also Captain Kilalo in MURDER IN PARADISE, which of course featured the aforementioned Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as a detective, but which deserves mention because it also featured James Pax during his run on NASTY BOYS – which couldn’t have had a better claim to TV-investigation-and-law-enforcement-ness, since the cast included (a) Dennis Franz as the police-lieutenant boss to Vegas undercover cops played by (b) Benjamin Bratt and, well, James Pax – and Pax couldn’t have a better claim to being an actor of Asian ancestry, since BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA.
Speaking of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, since Dennis Dun and James Hong have already been mentioned I’ll add that Eddie Lee the maître d’ (and a whole lot more!) was played by Donald Li, who later got tapped to play Detective Kim when someone in Hollywood decided Tommy Lee Jones needed to square off against Wesley Snipes doing Harrison Ford’s job in US MARSHALS.
Huh. I’ve kinda got a Six-Degrees-Of thing going there, from Mako to Pax to Li, but it looks to stall out at US MARSHALS, since I can’t keep going with Michael Paul Chan, since his decade-plus run as Michael Tao and et cetera already got mentioned.
Wait, I take that back: MARSHALS also had James Sie, who played FBI types on both the small screen and the big one – FBI Agent, FBI Tech, you name it – when he wasn’t busy voicing Ryan “The Atom” Choi on BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD.
(And he even voiced Jackie Chan for all those years on JACKIE CHAN ADVENTURES, because, c’mon: the real Jackie Chan was busy infiltrating secure locations and getting piece after piece of surveillance gear into place in THE TUXEDO, and so Sie voiced the relic-hunting archaeologist who gets called in to authenticate artwork or go undercover when he isn’t proving a guy’s innocence or foiling a heist.)
Huh. There’s a surprising amount of voice talent in that JACKIE CHAN cartoon: you’ve got Adam Baldwin as the villain, Andre Braugher in a recurring role,and everyone else from David Carradine to Miguel Ferrer – plus a bunch of folks who’ve already been mentioned: James Hong, Sab Shimono, Keone Young, Clyde Kusatsu, and so on.
At that, I see Lucy Liu did an episode, which brings me to her second-billed role in CYPHER: the movie opens with loser Jeremy Northam getting hired by Digicorp for a little corporate espionage; he promptly crafts a whole 007-esque persona for himself, smoking cigarettes and knocking back his new signature drink and confidently striking up a conversation with that attractive woman at the bar…
…who explains that she’s an inspector, sure as she spots the wedding band on his finger and so tells him to get lost. Is that worth mentioning? No, it’s not.
But, as per the trailer, there’s of course a lot more; I’ll spoiler how much more:
[SPOILER]She later meets back up with Jeremy Northam, patiently explaining that she knows full well he’s a corporate-espionage-type-in-training; he’s not gonna get hired at Sunways to secretly report back to Digicorp; he’s gonna get hired at Sunways as a known quantity, to funnel false information back to Digicorp.
Lucy Liu’s character? She works for Sebastian Rooks, a freelance operative Sunways hired to find out what Digicorp’s been up to.
Not that we ever see Rooks do anything detective-y; it’s Lucy Liu we see swapping out our hero’s wedding band for a tracking device, and it’s Lucy Liu we see conducting the interrogation while her goons do the silent manhandling, and it’s Lucy Liu we see spelling out which phone lines can and can’t be traced, and it’s Lucy Liu we see meeting with the protagonist to mention that – well, look: since Sunways will want Digicorp to think you’re visiting secure locations while gathering valuable info, the easiest and surest way to fake that is to actually send you to those secure locations, so how about you actually steal some info for us while you’re there?
She adds, while laying it all out for him, that Rooks is in the car behind them; it later turns out that, no, he wasn’t. We’re told, by a high muckety-muck at Digicorp, that “no one sees his face” – and that “companies hire him without actually knowing who he is.” And as you’re undoubtedly realizing by now, there ain’t nobody on the planet who actually answers to that name: tickets to the Lucy Liu show, right this way, thanks and tip your server.[/SPOILER]
Anyhow, the point is that I’ve seen CYPHER and so will gladly argue that she does plenty of second-billed detective work in that one as per her job; I haven’t seen RISE, and so can but quote wiki to spoiler her top-billed story arc in it:
Has the skillset of an investigative journalist, tracks down killers one by one. I mean, yeah, the killers are vampires – but as the writer/director put it, “the idea was really to do something sort of film noir-like with a female protagonist and introduce the concept of vampires into that. As a result, we have a movie that is basically a thriller about a cult – it just so happens to be a cult of vampires.” And, quoth Lucy Liu: “I understood the project from that perspective, what it needed and what the character was about. It wasn’t strictly horror—it has an incredible emotional undercurrent, that and it had a thriller, noir quality about it.” And, quoth Michael Chiklis: “What really appealed to me is that the word ‘vampire’ is never used in the film. Sebastian made it clear that there was never going to be the biting of the neck shot—that conventional vampire movie thing. Instead, it’s going to be something very unique—what we’re going for is a true noir—and that appealed to me greatly.”
Be that as it may, Liu was also in LOVE KILLS, with Philip Moon playing a rookie cop; soon after, Moon was playing Detective Steven Nimh on WALKER TEXAS RANGER shortly before playing Lieutenant Jim Wong on 24.
Anyhow, before acting on TRUE DETECTIVE, Moon got work on HAWAII FIVE-O earlier this year – which (a) can’t possibly surprise anyone at this point, and which (b) leads me to Sidney Liufau, who also got HAWAII FIVE-O work (playing an undercover cop for the HPD) years after he was Detective Kamakawewaole on HONOLULU CRU.