‘Lost’ star Yunjin Kim finds role expanding

“Lost” star Yunjin Kim, who plays the distaff half of a troubled Korean couple on ABC’s Wednesday night castaway hit, recently found herself owner of a new condo in Hawaii, where the show is filmed.

She’d considered buying a beachfront house but thought better of it.

“I’m alone,” she says, “unless I have visitors. I get a lot of visitors, just because I’m in Hawaii. I thought, ‘What am I going to do with four bedrooms in a beautiful beachfront house? I can invite people over, but I have to clean up after them.’ “

At least Kim has a nice place to lay her head after shooting all day on the beach, or in the show’s cave sets in a former Xerox office building in Honolulu – where a copy-machine repairman murdered seven of his co-workers in 1999.

“He shot a lot of people,” Kim says. “The building just has a bad history. We didn’t know it in the beginning, so we had to bless the set to make sure it let us work in there safely. We went through this Hawaiian ritual. It was the building nobody wanted to go into.”

Born in South Korea but raised mostly in New York City, Kim made a name for herself in Korean cinema before being cast on “Lost” in its second season of following the adventures of plane-crash survivors on a mysterious and dangerous Pacific island.

As someone who’s lived in both cultures, she initially wasn’t that happy about the relationship between her character, subservient wife Sun, and her controlling, angry husband, Jin (Daniel Dae Kim).

Sun secretly learned English as part of a plan to leave her husband but relented and stayed with him at the last minute, boarding the doomed Sydney-to-Los Angeles flight.

Over their time on the island, Sun has asserted her independence, but she and Jin appeared to come to an accommodation just before he set off on a raft with some of his fellow survivors at the end of last year.

“It’s complicated,” Kim says. “It’s not my ideal of a relationship. It started out being very stereotypical in the beginning, and I was concerned about that.

“You know, Korean men are not like that anymore. That was back in the 1950s.

“You’re fighting with stereotypes of many things,” she says. “But the reason why we went that way, it was for Sun to start out a certain way, and for her to make some kind of transition.

“J.J. (Abrams, the executive producer) knows. He knows Asian women. So he took her as far as he could at the end of the episode, so he could bring her back.

“First season, we saw her changing. I got to wear a bikini, something I never would have imagined in the pilot.”

In the end, says Kim, ” ‘Lost’ is about so many different things. From the beginning, when they ask what the show is about, I always say, ‘Like the title, you have lost people on a deserted island. Whether they’re trying to find their way home, or themselves or letting go of the past, putting some closure.’ I think the title gives away a lot.”