Masi Oka Recalls His Favourite TV & Movie Roles, From ‘Heroes’ To ‘The Meg’

After a few years as a jobbing actor (one of his earliest walk-on parts was in Austin Powers in Goldmember as ‘Japanese Pedestrian’), the former digital effects artist scored his breakout role as space-time manipulator Hiro Nakamura on the superhero drama Heroes. “My favourite memory of Heroes was when we started on the pilot,” the Tokyo-born Oka tells us over the phone from LA. And the worst? “When we had to say goodbye.” Of the 66 episodes he was in, he’s most proud of Season 1’s ‘Hiros’. “I got to play a present-day Hiro who’s innocent and a more mature version of him in the future, which was really fun. I also got to work with some amazing actors like Adrian Pasdar.”

In the big screen version of the ’60s TV comedy series of the same name, Oka was IT guy Bruce to Steve Carell’s bumbling spy Maxwell Smart. “Steve Carell is one of my idols, and The Office is one of my favourite shows. I remember observing him and realising how generous he was as an actor and as a person. Anne Hathaway wasn’t a huge movie star then, so it’s nice to see how far she’s come since. She was a generous person as well. Dwayne Johnson was just an untouchable hulk,” says Oka, with a laugh. Oka and Nate Torrence (as fellow techie Lloyd) also appeared in the direct-to-video spin-off Get Smart’s Bruce and Lloyd: Out of Control.

Shortly after Heroes ended, Oka became part of another crime-fighting collective. On Hawaii Five-O, he played Dr Max Bergman, a geeky coroner who dazzles Alex O’Loughlin’s top cop with his medical expertise and capacity for endless minutiae. “Hawaii is an amazing location — it’s full of culture. And being Japanese, it was nice to be in Hawaii [which has a large population of residents of Japanese descent]. The opportunity to work with Grace Park, who played Officer Kono Kalakaua, was a huge motivation for me. Also, I was definitely glad to be on one hit TV show after another. So I’m very grateful for this opportunity.”

Five year after Heroes went off the air, it was rebooted as a 13-part “event mini-series” Heroes Reborn. But the reception was lukewarm and plans for a follow-up were scrapped. In any case, Oka is glad he was part of the short-lived revival. “I wanted to pass the torch on to the next generation, and I thought of the show as a thank-you to the fans.”

In this killer creature-feature, Oka stars as Toshi, who alongside Ólafur Darri Olafsson and Jessica McNamee play crew members in a submersible exploratory vessel stranded at the bottom of the ocean with a 75-ft prehistoric shark. Enter Jason Statham’s badass rescue diver to save the day. “We did the piloting scenes inside a submersible, so we got really cosy,” says Oka. “It was a tiny confined space and Darri was so huge that he took up half the space. We definitely got really close to each other, mentally and physically.” All in all, Oka had a blast shooting the movie in Auckland, New Zealand (“it’s just beautiful”). No bad memories, then? Well, maybe one. “There was a scene where we had to knock ourselves around in the sub. I volunteered to do it without the stuntmen. The director, Jon Turtletaub, then said the first negative thing to me, which was that I couldn’t do the stunts at all.”

They swam with sharks: (from left) Director Jon Turtletaub, Page Kennedy, Olafur Darri Olafsson, Masi Oka, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose, Jason Statham, Jessica McNamee, Li Bingbing and Cliff Curtis at the LA premiere of The Meg at TLC Chinese Theatre on Aug 6.