Paul Sun-Hyung Lee talks Asian representation in ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’

Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, who plays Uncle Iroh in the Netflix adaptation of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' says we're living in a 'golden age' of Asian representation in media.

Fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender have been waiting for this day for a long time: the release of a live-action adaptation that finally captures the spirit and magic of the original beloved cartoon.

The cult classic cartoon aired for three seasons on Nickelodeon starting in 2005 and hasn’t left the zeitgeist since, even after a disappointing live-action movie came out in 2010 directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

It’s an easy claim to make that Netflix’s Last Airbender blows the 2010 movie out of the water — but it does so much more than that. It brings to life a world rich in beauty and history while staying true to the whimsy that made the original series so special. It’s at once expansive in its scope and grounded in its characters, everything you’d expect for a show about a group of, well, just kids saving the world.

Avatar: The Last Airbender tells the story of the Avatar, a “chosen one” character who is the only person on Earth who can master all four elements: earth, wind, air and fire. In The Last Airbender, our young protagonist Aang is just that, the last of his kind after a genocide wipes out his people. In his quest to take on the conquering Fire Nation, Aang picks up friends along the way and audiences get taken on a journey that showcases the unique nations associated with each element, based on Inuit, East Asian and South Asian cultures.

Indigenous and Asian representation is abound in Netflix’s eight-episode series, something that was sorely missing in the 2010 movie. Global News sat down with South Korean-Canadian actor Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, best known for his role as Appa on Kim’s Convenience, to chat about taking on the iconic character of Uncle Iroh and how Asian representation in media has changed since he first became an actor.

“When I started off, it felt like a desolate wasteland, where you kind of felt doomed to forever play a gang member or convenience store owner, or a doctor or lawyer or whatever,” Lee said. “Characters that were just window dressing and not really characters, but more decorations, human decorations that were sprinkled in the background to show diversity but were never the ones that were the centre of attention or the ones that drove the narrative.”

Coming off a major boom in Asian cinema and diverse casting, Lee says “we are living in a golden age, and I love it because it’s a movement and not a trend.”