Exclusive Interview: Yoshi Sudarso Talks Bullet Train, Identity, and Fatherhood

Yoshi Sudarso has quickly emerged as one of Hollywood’s most versatile leading men. He has brought dynamic characters to life in projects like Buffalo Boys, Power Rangers, and Pretty Boys. This summer, he can be seen in one of the most highly-anticipated films of the year: Bullet Train.

In Bullet Train, an unlucky assassin is determined to do his job peacefully after one too many gigs have gone off the rails. Fate, however, may have other plans, as his latest mission puts him on a collision course with lethal adversaries from around the globe—all with connected, yet conflicting objectives—on the world’s fastest train.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Yoshi about his journey in this industry, Bullet Train, and more!

PC: Growing up, you never imagined a career in this industry was possible. What was the turning point for you?
Yoshi: There were multiple turning points. I grew up in Indonesia and moved to America. I never thought of what that would do to my life. Film and the entertainment industry were never in my vision or in my peripherals. It wasn’t something that I thought about at all. It didn’t seem possible. I grew up liking Jackie Chan. My parents—my dad specifically—loved a lot of Hong Kong films. My parents loved Chinese dramas. I grew up watching Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and those things. That brought about my desire to be a part of that world.

But there were two moments when I was like, “I could do that.” This was before I was even close to getting into the industry. I want to say I was about eighteen or nineteen. I learned how to do flips and things like that. Don’t judge me on this. I was watching High School Musical, and I saw the dancers doing flips in the background. I was like, “I could do that. Why don’t they hire me for that? Isn’t that how that works?” I just didn’t know how any of it worked. I was like, “I’m Indonesian. That’s not a thing. I haven’t seen anybody like me on screen.” Which was a big part of it. The ones you saw were Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun-fat, Bruce Lee—but that’s all you saw.

I remember watching a Disney XD show. I’m too old for this, but whatever, leave me alone. [laughs] It was a show called Aaron Stone. I remember the lead actress was Tania Gunadi. I was like, “That’s an Indonesian name if I’ve ever heard one.” Of course, it turned out that she was. She’s a great friend of mine now, and she’s awesome. But that was when I was like, “Is it possible for somebody like me to be in this industry and to be on TV?”

During college, I majored in math because that’s what you do. Honestly, I wanted to teach math. I loved math. Math was the language that was universal for me. When I came to America, that was the language I understood. I wanted to teach math and coach cheerleading. That was my plan after college. Then a friend of mine said, “Hey, I want to be on TV. Want to join me?” We did some castings for extras. That was the catapult. That was when I was like, “This isn’t so far away. I’m over here, and those are the lead actors. I’m here. I just have to make my step that way.” That’s where it all started and when I realized I had a passion for performing.

As introverted as I was, I was also extroverted when it came time to put on a show. They call that ambivert. But that’s when I realized this was a possibility. Then it was about working, grinding, and realizing it wasn’t as easy as going from here to there.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
Yoshi: Wow. I feel like that changes on a daily basis. The reason why I’m struggling to answer this is because I find that it’s something that I have to have internally versus externally because it always changes. In this business, from what I’ve learned, it’s a little bit tough to rely on external forces because at the drop of a hat a person can change or a job can go away. You could end up on the cutting room floor. But I have to say that my wife and my brother are the most consistent. So if it’s an external source and looking outside of myself, it would be my wife and brother, and recently my son.

But my brother has been my partner in all of this. We learned it all together. I brought him in. We learned together and we’ve always envisioned this ladder that we’re both on. No matter what, somebody’s going to be a little higher on the ladder. You help each other climb. If you’ve ever done tandem climbing that’s what you do. You root yourself and you allow the other person to climb, and then they root themselves and you climb. That’s how I see our relationship. It’s rocky because for the longest time we would go out for the same project and it didn’t make sense. We don’t look like each other at all.

As far as my wife, she’s been such a strong core because she’s outside of this industry completely. She’s seen me go through all of my changes and asked me the questions that helped me internalize, like “Why am I doing that? Why am I feeling this way? Why was that such a problem?” Or whatever it was. “Is this the right project to take?” There are times when I feel pressured by everyone else to take a certain project and she goes, “Why?” Having one person questioning your choices versus having a yes man around helps you take that step back.

So I would say those two. And again, also my son recently. Everything is something that he’s going to see. I always ask, “Is it something he’ll be proud of?” This is for him now. It’s no longer for me.

PC: You’ve been incredibly open about your journey with identity. Can you talk a bit about the struggles you faced immigrating to the U.S. and how there were times when you were losing part of your culture? How has that impacted the way that you’ve now approached your career?
Yoshi: Moving here when I was about nine, my brother and I didn’t speak much English at all. We only knew what we saw on TV. I don’t think we ever fully said this to each other, but we made a conscious decision to stop speaking our native tongue. We stopped speaking Indonesian so that we wouldn’t have an accent when we spoke English because we got made fun of for so long. We were in ESL for a couple of years. Luckily, English is a fairly easy language to learn if you’re younger, but it has all these different nuances.

But that was something that my brother and I struggled with. We ended up going to a very Asian elementary, middle, and high school. It was very Filipino and Korean. I went to Cerritos. We’re very proud 562-ers. We love 562. It’s very Asian. But because it was so Asian, everybody didn’t want to be Asian. We all wanted to be something else. There was that colorist hierarchy as well. Being Southeast Asian meant something different. I grew up in a different situation from others who grew up in very White neighborhoods. That wasn’t the case for me—it was very Asian.

That came with its own problems. There are always going to be problems, no matter where you are. It’s just how you learn to deal with it and what it does for you when you grow up. Peter and I pushed away from our native tongue and our culture. We didn’t want to bring our food to school. I got bullied for my food. I don’t know if he did. I wanted to have American meals, even though we were in an Asian school. How ridiculous is that? I wanted stupid sloppy joe instead of my mom’s Batang or lumpia. We pushed away anime and things that came from Asian culture.

It wasn’t until I was older that I started realizing what I had lost. I realized that when I was working on a project in Indonesia. I’m very fortunate. I had already done things over here when Indonesia got wind of me. They were like, “Oh, he’s an actor. He’s in Hollywood, and he’s also Indonesian. We don’t have that.” I was the first Indonesian to be a Power Ranger. My brother was second, which was weird. Because of that, I started getting traction in Indonesia. I got my first movie offer out there.

It just so happened that they needed somebody who was Americanized but spoke Indo a bit. It was literally me. They didn’t even know it at the time. It was a cowboy movie. That was my first entry into entertainment. Because I got that job, I went to Indonesia thinking, “This is easy. I’m Indonesian. This is easy.” That’s when I realized, “I don’t know anything about the food. I don’t know anything about the location.” I was actually scared to go at first because of what I had been told by the media in terms of what Indonesia was like. I myself as an Indonesian who immigrated here fell into that trap. I realized, “Oh my goodness. Indonesia is actually beautiful. What am I afraid of?”

We’ve been shown The Raid, and that’s all we know about Jakarta—drugs, blood, and all the craziness. That isn’t the case at all. It’s a beautiful city. Of course, it has its drawbacks, but what city doesn’t? I live in LA and it’s a little crazy. When I went back, I realized that I didn’t speak my language the way that I thought I could, and I couldn’t read. The sad part is that Indonesian goes with the ABCs. We have the same alphabet. I was like, “Why can’t I read this?” It’s not different characters like Mandarin or Japanese. I was like, “I can’t read this and it’s ABCs. I don’t understand it.”

That was when I was like, “Yo, I’ve been pushing away my culture for so long.” I no longer belonged to it. It no longer felt right to me. I was now foreign in two different worlds. I was foreign in Indonesia and foreign in America. But I think that’s how a lot of immigrants feel. They feel like they don’t belong in either world. That’s when I had to find myself and realize that not only do we belong in both worlds, we are the bridge between both worlds. This comes from watching too much Avatar. [laughs] That’s how it has helped inform my identity. As an actor, it’s broadened my spectrum and broadened the opportunities that I’m allowed to have. I have the ability to go back to Indonesia whenever there is a movie that wants me. Hire me, guys! [laughs] I have the opportunity to go back there and do something there, which I love doing. COVID screwed that up, but hopefully, it’ll come back.

PC: You were saying earlier that you didn’t think a career in this industry was possible because you didn’t see yourself on screen. What has it meant to you to know that you’re paving the way so that future generations won’t have to experience the same thing? You’ve also had so much success in your career. When you look back, is there a moment that stands out?
Yoshi: Power Rangers will always be the biggest catalyst. I’ve done other things before that and after that, but Power Rangers was one of the biggest ones. I didn’t realize I was the first Indonesian to become a Power Ranger, but I guess it made sense because I had never seen one. But until it happened, nobody talked about it. Nobody talked about the fact that there wasn’t one, and it was the weirdest thing to me. Power Rangers gets a lot of flack because people are like, “You only have certain ethnicities.” But they do a very good job of not having to explain why people are of a certain ethnicity.

My character was a caveman. They didn’t go, “We found him in Asia. He was frozen in Asia. That’s why he’s Asian.” They didn’t need to do that. They were like, “He was frozen and he’s alive after how many thousands of years.” They don’t have to explain my Asianness. That was cool. It wasn’t like, “My guy was eating dumplings the whole time.” Don’t get me wrong, I love Asian stories, but sometimes it’s beautiful when there’s just an Asian character who’s Asian and doesn’t need to be there to show his Asianness. That was one of the coolest parts for me. That happened in 2014 when those conversations weren’t happening that much yet.

That helped me wrap my head around the whole thing a little bit sooner. In the twenty-five years of Power Rangers, everyone spoke English fluently. There was one character who didn’t, and it was Tarzan. Then he ends up learning it fluently. My character did not speak English fluently. It wasn’t that he had an accent because he was an Asian, it was because he was a caveman and he didn’t speak until he was unfrozen. He spoke like a child. He learned. It’s very much how my son sounds now. [laughs]

It actually upset me at first because I was like, “Oh, yeah. You got the Asian guy not speaking English fluently. Awesome.” But my acting coach was like, “You can’t hate your character. No matter who he is, even if they’re a villain, you have to love your character because otherwise, you’ll feel disconnected.” I found a way to love it. Then after it started airing—I’ve told this story a few times because it’s the craziest thing—I got a letter. We would get these letters from kids all around the world. There was a kid from Brazil I believe. He moved to America around the same age that I moved there, and he didn’t speak English. He said he was bullied for not speaking English, just like me. When our show came out, whenever they would play and hang out, they were like, “You could be the Blue Ranger because you can be Koda.” That made me realize that there was another world that wasn’t seen. Not only did I not see Asian men who looked like me on screen without being the butt of a joke, but I also didn’t see people who didn’t speak English fluently, and this show represented them in such a beautiful light. That would be the best moment for me because it took a child for me to realize what I was missing from my childhood. I thought that was really cool.

PC: Why do you think it’s taken the industry so long to get to this place where we’re getting more inclusive stories and representation? When did you notice that shift?
Yoshi: I can’t speak for everyone, but I think it’s our new generation. It’s the rebellious Asians who don’t want to do what we’re told. My mom didn’t want me to do this. In fact, I remember her crying to me about it when I brought my brother into it. They love it now. They understand that I can take care of myself by doing this. A lot of Asian parents worry about their kids. They’re always worried that you’re not eating enough and that you’re not going to be able to survive with this job, which I get.

But if we keep doing what we’re told and making sure that we’re the model minority, we’ll never be able to think for ourselves. I think it took this generation of people who are willing to go out there, take risks, go out on a limb, and do what isn’t conventional. We not only have actors but people behind the camera as well. That’s what it takes—people who are in media, people who are uplifting, people who are writing. All of these different aspects are what make this a reality.

PC: Tell us about Bullet Train and your character in the film.
Yoshi: Bullet Train was such a fun project to do. It was my first one coming out of COVID. It was in September of 2020. We were all very worried. We got swabbed sometimes twice a day. But it was such a wonderful experience because I hadn’t done a project in LA for a very long time. I’m always out of town. This was the first one that I got to film here, and it was so great because it was around the same time that my son was about to be born.

My character is a bit of a secret. I play the younger version of one of the characters in the film. It’s an important piece of the film because it shows why the characters are where they are and how they got there. I was only in the flashback scenes. I play a younger version of Hiroyuki Sanada, who I’m a huge fan of. I’ve actually been told that I look like a young version of him. When I got the part, I was like, “I’m 100% down.” I actually got it through a stunt coordinator whom I had worked with on a commercial a while back. They were like, “I’m going to send your stuff to casting and this and that.”

Two weeks had gone by and I didn’t hear anything. I was like, “I guess that one is gone.” Then wardrobe called me and they were like, “We need you to go in for a fitting for this character.” I was like, “What am I doing? What project is this?” I was so confused. That’s when I found out that I had booked it. I believe the script was getting changed here and there. They were very tight with the script, so I didn’t know much about my character. I just knew that I had to be a younger version of Hiroyuki Sanada. I was like, “This character speaks Japanese.” They didn’t give me a full script, but they gave me an idea of what was happening.

I was like, “You know what? I’m going to ask a couple of my friends how to say certain things within the scenes. I’m going to make sure that I know what I’m doing on the day in case they make me say something.” I talked to Mari Takahasi and Miki Ishikawa. They actually sent me a bunch of voice recordings of how to say certain things. That’s what I went with. I remember on the day that we were shooting this there was this really cool scene with a beautiful set. We shot everything in studio—or at least we did for my part. They had to make it look like neo-Japan because we couldn’t go anywhere.

It was beautiful. I remember the scene was very emotional and very taxing. There was no sound guy. They didn’t mic me up or anything like that. I just did it. I did my thing. On the second take, I saw David Leitch go over to the sound guy and say, “Make sure you get them.” That’s how that happened. That’s when they told me I got cast. It was amazing.

PC: What is that process like when you’re sharing a character?
Yoshi: We would see each other passing by and have a chat. I was hanging out with Andrew Koji most of the time. He’s super cool and very talented. If you’re not watching Warrior, go watch Warrior. I remember passing by Hiroyuki and I asked, “Do you mind if I chat with you for a little bit? I’m playing your younger self.” He was like, “Oh, great!” I spoke to him a bit in Japanese because I was practicing. I was able to introduce myself.

I asked him how he felt about certain things and how the character was. I knew that we had to share something that happens to me and then becomes part of his character. It was like, “How do you want that to happen?” We had a chat. The coolest part is after we shot my big scene, they edited it and showed it to everyone but me. [laughs] The director was like, “Great job!” Other people were like, “Great job! It looked so good.” But Sanada came up to me and he was like, “Really great job! I saw the scene, and it’s great.” I was like, “Cool. I’m happy.” You don’t want to step on his shoes because this is predominantly his character. I wanted to make sure that he was happy with what I was doing, but he was like, “Do whatever you need to do. I’ll make it work.” Because my scenes were shot first. I wanted to give him as much of that character as he wanted. He was such a cool dude for being willing to take time in between his scenes to work that all out.

PC: You were talking about that emotional scene that you filmed. As an actor, how do you create the space for yourself to dive into those more emotional arcs?
Yoshi: It’s different every time. For this one, it was very easy. Sometimes it happens so easily because it’s so parallel to your own world. It was a scene with my wife and child. I just had a child, and my wife was at home. It was easy to replace those faces with the faces of my wife and child. But I do think it has to be different every time. The way that film works is that you do things over and over again. You have to find that place quickly.

You need to find those triggers. Sometimes it’s taking five minutes to listen to music or sometimes it’s just closing your eyes really quickly. I couldn’t keep my phone on me, so I couldn’t have a photo of them with me. It was just imagining them in my head. I’m very lucky to be able to just imagine that in my head. But that was the connection that I made.

To keep up with Yoshi, follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, and YouTube. Watch Bullet Train in theaters now.

Photo Credit: Martin Wong