Exclusive Interview: Ian Anthony Dale Talks Accused, Bringing Cultural Specificities to the Story, and Exploring His Character’s Emotional Depth

Ian Anthony Dale is blazing a trail for underrepresented communities who want to see their stories reflected properly in mainstream media. It has only been recently in his two-plus decade career that Ian has had the opportunity to showcase his emotional depth and range and the reason why he founded 20K.

Best known for his groundbreaking performances in Hawaii Five-0, Salvation, and The Resident, Ian can next be seen in the anthology series, Accused. In his episode titled “Jiro’s Story,” Ian plays the titular character whose mother has taken care of his brother Sam ever since a car accident left Sam with a traumatic brain injury. But when their mother dies, and it appears that Sam is being abused in his new group home, Jiro has to decide which is more important—his brother, or his freedom.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Ian about Accused, how he worked with the creative team to bring cultural specificities to the episode, and sinking his teeth into this role.

PC: Throughout your career, the characters and projects that you’ve chosen to be a part of have created a lasting impact on audiences. How did Accused come across your path? Was there a moment when you were reading the script when you knew you wanted to be a part of it?
Ian: Rarely in my twenty-one years of doing this has a script come across my desk that I was able to connect to so instinctually and naturally as I did with this one. That starts with the fact that it’s written by Karl Taro [Greenfeld], who is half-Japanese. I, myself, am half-Japanese. The story centers around a Japanese American family. That being the first impression, I was floored. I was so delighted that I had this opportunity to be a part of this show. Then, when I actually read the story, I ended up crying as I read the script for the first time.

I was like, “I can’t believe this is something that I get to sink my teeth into and try to bring to life on the screen because it really does have an emotional depth.” Unfortunately, I’ve rarely gotten to play that depth in the characters that I’ve played, and I’ve been doing this for twenty-one years. All that to say that I was extremely excited to be able to take on this role and be a part of an episode that’s centered around an Asian American family and is designed specifically to try to make audiences feel that they can relate to this family. I was over the moon.

PC: At the center of this episode is the relationship between these two brothers who have such a complex history. How were you able to build that bond with the limited time that you had to film this episode?
Ian: One of the things that resonated with me about the story was how strong the themes of family and of what lengths will you go in order to protect your family were. I have four siblings of my own. I have two young children. Family is extremely important to me, so I instinctually related to those themes built into this episode.

In “Jiro’s Story,” we get to meet Jiro and his brother Sam as their mother has passed away. Their mother has been Sam’s caretaker ever since an accident that they experienced when they were younger that led to Sam having a traumatic brain injury. After she passes, Sam is put into an assisted living facility. Jiro starts to suspect that Sam might be experiencing abuse there. We get to follow Jiro in his journey as he has to decide, “Do I protect my brother or do I continue to live this life of prioritizing my wife and my daughters and be unburdened by the responsibility of having to care for my brother for the rest of my life the way that my mother did so selflessly.” We get to see Jiro face these impossible moral dilemmas throughout the episode and go to great lengths in order to ensure his brother’s safety.

But in terms of forming that bond, I have three brothers. I was able to take the feelings, the love, the care, and the camaraderie that I have with them and place it into the actor who played my brother, Takashi [Yamaguchi]. TV is often designed to be an accelerated, fast-track pace. We only had about 48 hours to familiarize ourselves with one another before we were on-screen filming. So, we went to lunch, walked around Toronto together, and established an immediate connection. A lot of that connection was built upon the fact that we’re both Japanese and we could connect over our shared experiences in trying to carve out a life and career for ourselves in this challenging industry. We tried to form that bond offscreen to make it feel authentic and real on screen.

PC: Like you were just saying that theme about the lengths we’ll go to protect the ones that we love hit home for me. It created this morally gray area that your character gets to explore. How much fun is that for you as a creative to play in that space? Are those the types of roles that you’re most attracted to?
Ian: I think all actors, I don’t want to speak out of turn, but I would imagine all actors are most drawn to the characters that have the greatest amount of emotional depth and get to experience all of these dilemmas and conflicts that they have to work through. To be quite honest, oftentimes those types of characters are set aside for the lead or the second lead of a particular series or show or project or film.

For the better part of the first half of my career, I was on the outskirts of those opportunities. Only in the last five, six, seven years have I really gotten an opportunity to take on some of these more complex characters. A part of that has to do with that I just needed time to build up a collection of personal experiences that would allow me to execute in the way that I needed to for Jiro. The other part has to do with the way our industry as a whole is opening up to telling stories of underrepresented communities and putting Asian Americans front and center in the lead role and putting African Americans, putting trans, deaf, and indigenous people and their stories front and center. It’s great to see. As someone who’s been doing this for twenty-one years, it’s great to now experience those opportunities opening up to me where I get to go deeply into a character and try to show an emotional range and life that hasn’t always been there with other characters that I’ve played in the past.

PC: You’ve also shared on social media that as a father you want to make sure that your children are able to see themselves reflected in the media that they consume. Everyone did such a fantastic job incorporating the Japanese culture and language in a subtle way that it’s integrated in the story organically and not for tokenism. What was it like getting to collaborate with the rest of the cast, the writers, and the director to bring that authenticity to the screen?
Ian: It was great. I remember a moment when Jiro is preparing a bento box and I was cutting the tamagoyaki, which is an egg dish. The prop person gave me a knife to cut this tamagoyaki with. It was such a random knife from a drawer that didn’t have any specificity to it. I said, “Jiro would absolutely have a Japanese blade used particularly for thinly slicing eggs like this. If you want to feature this knife, let’s make sure in the fifteen minutes that we have that we hunt one down. Let’s try to get something that looks at least as close to that as possible,” because it’s really important to try to be as authentic as possible.

We have Jiro’s daughters referring to grandma as bachan, and that’s something that I refer to my grandmother as. It’s what my children refer to my mom as. It was really important for us to get all those cultural specificities as correct as possible because when you do get an opportunity to tell stories like this, you want it to come across as authentic and as real and as relatable as possible. There’s a certain amount of importance placed on getting it right.

PC: Another theme that really came across within this episode is that you can’t go through life without loved ones and their support. Who are the people in your own life who’ve helped shape the storyteller that you are today and who have been on this journey with you?
Ian: I credit my mother and father for their support of me and this career pursuit from the very beginning and all the ways in which they taught me to be a good person and a kind, respectful, and accountable human being. All of that, once you become an adult, becomes so valuable. I’ve always said, “You can have a career in this business simply by working extremely hard and treating everybody with kindness and respect, and holding yourself accountable.” If you can do those three things and you have any talent whatsoever, you can find success. I have to credit my parents for instilling all of that in me from an early age. Then, as I mentioned, I have a wonderful group of siblings, three brothers and a sister, and then my wife who is extremely supportive. My children are the loves of my life.

In this episode, my character is dealing with the realities of perhaps losing the opportunity to protect and safeguard his brother. When you have children, you understand how precious they are and how much you love them and want to protect them forever. It’s very easy to transfer those feeling into the character that you’re playing and the circumstances of the scene.

There’s a variety of different things that you can pull from in order to produce the intended emotion of a scene. But yeah, I mean your question reminds me of all the things that I had circulating in my mind for the big courtroom scene, which I can’t really speak too much about, but I had thoughts of my father and the limited time that I might have with him and my mother as they get older. I thought about my children. I thought about all of those things. It really reinforced for me, as a human, how important family is and how important doing whatever it takes in life to make sure they’re protected, cared for, safe, and loved.

PC: You actually answered my next question. Without giving any spoilers, it’s established very early on that your character has declined to take a potential plea deal for reasons unknown at the start, and the story builds to that reveal, which makes those final scenes all that more devasting. Often when you’re filming television, you don’t shoot in chronological order. When did you film that scene? Can you talk a bit more about how you created that space?
Ian: Oh boy. I think we filmed that scene on day three, and we did an eight-day shoot for this episode. The scene was about a page-and-a-half monologue. Three-quarters of it were rewritten about 36 hours before I performed it. So, if there wasn’t already a lot of pressure on me to try and deliver in that moment, after those rewrites came in, I was like, “Oh man, buckle in. Let’s figure it out. Let’s find a way. You got 36 hours.”

As I just mentioned in answering your previous question, you really draw from all the richest, hottest circumstances of your own experiences—at least I do—to try to put yourself in the right emotional heart and head space to deliver that scene. When something is written as well as this episode was, and that particular scene was, there is this melding that happens between your own emotional life and the words.

Then, you have to trust that if you go on this journey and let things happen spontaneously and are relaxed enough to let those things happen, something great could come of that. I feel really fortunate that everything clicked on the day that I shot it and it continued to click even as we shot everybody else’s coverage because I’m like, “I’ve found the right lane to be in this scene and this scene is only good as everybody else involved in the scene.” So, whether I was doing the offscreen coverage for the prosecuting attorney or Julia [Chan] who played my wife or the jurors, I wanted to try to make sure that I gave them the same energy I was in so they could hopefully be compelled to show the same emotion that was required for this scene to be effective. I felt an enormous sense of relief, satisfaction, and validation after I finished this scene. I’ve finished scenes before that required me to be emotional, and I walked off set and thought, “I should quit acting. That was absolute dog sh*t.” But I was very fortunate that I didn’t feel that on this day. It was a good day.

PC: You’ve made it your purpose as a storyteller to promote the next generation of artists who are eager to redefine the media landscape, which is why you cofounded 20K. For aspiring creatives, including the two young ladies that played your daughters in the episode, what advice would you give them as they discover and develop their own voices and traverse this industry?
Ian: What I often tell young aspiring creatives in the Asian American community is, “Listen, there have been so many people that have come ahead of you to open doors and pave roads, and when you get your opportunity, you need to be ready. So absolutely do the work to become ready because you may only get one chance.”

In terms of trying to get your stories out there, you have to write. You have to be relentless in the exhaustive work you put into trying to get your stories heard and your stories told. That’s one of the reasons why I started 20K.

I started my career in 2002—that’s when I got my first on-camera job. There was such a deficit of representative media that portrayed the Asian American experience in a real, positive way, so it’s been a lifelong and career-long goal of mine to try to provide opportunities for greater representation to give people their shot and to try to fill the television landscape with more stories like Jiro’s story in Accused, where the audiences are given an opportunity to relate to a community that doesn’t look like them, to feel comfortable with a community that doesn’t look like them being in their living room, and to normalize the experiences of all these underrepresented groups. That is what we’re trying to accomplish as a society. It’s certainly something we should be trying to accomplish in the media landscape because, as you know, it’s so powerful, and the self-esteem of the next generation is dependent upon there being positive representation of themselves on TV, on social media, and in the movies.

I’m excited about this show. Howard [Gordon], Alex [Gansa], David [Shore], and Fox have done a tremendous job in trying to curate a show that is as diverse and inclusive as possible and filled with stories of various underrepresented groups and trying to be real and authentic and tell meaningful stories. I’m super excited that they got a second season to continue this journey.

PC: Outside of this project, what’s next for you?
Ian: Honestly, I’m very excited to see what comes after this episode because, as I was saying earlier, over the course of my twenty-one years in front of the camera, I’ve never had an opportunity to dig this deep with a character. Oftentimes, you can easily get pigeonholed into one type of character or another in this industry. I’m hopeful that this experience allows me to perhaps break out of any boxes that I’ve been put in by the industry at large and get some more opportunities to do great emotional character work on screen.

To keep up with Ian, follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Watch his episode of Accused on April 4th at 9/8c on Fox.

Photo Credit: Vince Trupsin