10 min read

Hoon Lee hadn’t read East of Eden when he auditioned for Zoe Kazan’s much-anticipated adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, but it would soon change his life. The standout character actor, known for his turns on Banshee and Your Friends & Neighbors, was told he’d be a good fit to play Lee, the Chinese American caretaker (and, soon enough, pseudo mother and father) of the splintered Trask family.

“It was one of many books I was supposed to have read in high school and did not read,” Lee, 53, tells me over Zoom on the eve of East of Eden’s October 1 premiere on Netflix. “Moby Dick’s still on the list.”

But when Lee received the material he’d have to perform, all he felt was disbelief.

“The audition sides were the scene where Sam Hamilton and Lee are talking and Lee drops his facade,” he says. “In the beginning of that scene, Lee is fully speaking in this thick pidgin accent. Part of me, as an Asian actor, just goes, ‘Here we go.’ You don’t know what to expect. But when I read through the rest of it and I saw how it transpired, I was immediately intrigued.”

Lee immediately downloaded the book, cross-referenced the scene, and “was really stunned to see that it was so true to the novel.” He burned through the roughly 230,000-word epic, which follows two families across decades in California’s Salinas Valley, in a single weekend. By the time Lee finished East of Eden, whether or not Kazan would offer him the role was nearly an afterthought.

“No matter what happened with the audition, I felt the book had come to me as a gift,” he says. “When I went into that audition, it was almost to thank them for bringing me the book.”

Lee earned the part and promptly imbued Steinbeck’s character with such an outstanding amount of heart, presence, and soul that it’ll be a crime if he’s not hoisting trophies next awards season. Now East of Eden is firmly one of 2026’s best shows. And in a series that also features megawatt stars such as Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott, and Mike Faist, it might just be Lee whom you’ll be thinking about long after the credits roll.

Below, Lee tells us exactly how East of Eden left a life-altering mark on him—and how it might do the same for you too.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ESQUIRE: I know you just finished working on Your Friends & Neighbors season 3. What should we get excited about?

HOON LEE: Oh boy. I always feel that shows really find their footing in the second to third seasons. We know what our strengths are. We know how to avoid certain kinds of traps. Also, you loosen up on a certain level. You’re able to have more fun. That’s really what I feel about season 3. There’s a relaxation into the fun of the show. Whenever that happens, particularly with [series creator Jonathan Tropper’s] shows, there’s often more darkness that comes with that.

So many streaming series see a loss of interest in the second season, and I love that Your Friends & Neighbors is still building an audience.

Like Banshee. I remember that, because that was my first series-regular show. All of the first reviews were like, “It’s trashy fun.” Which was great, but not at the time. Prestige television was just rolling out, which is part of the reason Cinemax was doing that at all. By the second or third season, the same critics were like, “This might be one of the best shows on television.” That taught me a lot about just how important it is to try to keep people on the journey so that they can invest more in the characters and be with us when we figure out how to deepen them.

Do you miss your character at all?

I do. I recognize it might not be a character I’d be allowed to play in today’s climate. So I feel very lucky to have been able to play him, and especially at that time in my career. I’d never been asked to play a character like that, so it was such a gift. I do miss him, but I recognize that would be hard to pull off now.

To go back to East of Eden, it really struck me how much every performance seems dialed in to the spirit of the book. It all seems very internalized.

That was my perception on set when working with my colleagues. It’s a beautiful feeling when a project is universally understood to be bigger than you and bigger than the collective—that you’re serving something. And service itself was a theme that I thought a lot about with Lee, specifically the idea of how his relationship to service changes over the course of the novel.

Zoe has spoken a little bit to the idea that there was some question internally because of my Korean American heritage versus Chinese American, and fortunately that got resolved. But I felt so connected to the character because—and I was mildly ashamed that I had not really been aware of this character prior—he’s very arguably one of the best written Asian American characters in American Western literature. And such a rich person, so integral to the story. It was one of those situations where I felt incredibly lucky to be given the chance to play him.

In some ways, Lee stands out in the series because he was left out of the 1955 movie, which partially formed the American imagination of East of Eden.

I didn’t watch the movie. And I did make the choice not to watch the movie afterward. Partially, you know—there’s an acknowledgment there. The adaptation that Zoe has created is very special and incredibly difficult. My first reaction after finishing the novel was that this could be terrible because it seemed like an impossible task to adapt it. But when I saw the scripts, I was very much put at ease.

Tell me about Lee’s journey to San Francisco—it’s mentioned in the novel, but the series expands on it much more.

I was surprised and moved that they did want to show it. It emphasizes Lee’s role as a true partner—in a technical sense of showing part of his story—to balance out how much we see of Adam’s story. That’s also important to establish their parental dynamic.

It’s also important that we see Lee’s mentor, Lau, teach him a real lesson. There’s that line: “Are you so much a child still to think anyone gets the life they planned?”

I feel this even on set. I’m here at a certain age dealing with actors who are younger and working with Ciarán [Hinds, who plays Samuel Hamilton], who is older. I’m partnered with colleagues, like Chris Abbott, who are technically younger but actually more advanced in terms of professional experience. So the dynamic of who’s an authority in a given conversation is constantly shifting and sliding. When you examine all the thematics of the book about who is an authority figure, it’s a great thing to see that we are all on this continuum all the time.

Stories that are that deep, they remind us of the things we already know. Lee lives in the family unit he’s supposed to be in, but he needs someone to tell him that. He needs someone to remind him that the dream you have for yourself is sometimes a lie that you’re telling yourself.

That’s what timshel means to me—it’s about circles and what it means to break a cycle. Lee goes through this journey and lands right back where he was but with a new understanding.

I got interested in layman’s physics and quantum theory a little while ago. There’s something called the block universe. It’s basically the idea that all realities already exist and the forward arrow of time is an illusion. So that would speak to the idea of a predetermined universe, which from a literary standpoint is like fate. All decisions have already been made, but we still have to live in the world as if we have free choice. And there’s something about the idea that we choose that is really important—even if it is not true.

So we make decisions every day about everything, and it’s our responsibility and our burden. It’s our privilege, right? Every single character touches this idea in different ways. I loved that in the centering of Cathy. And in shining an additional light on Lee, we are opening up in our interpretation a new window to this idea through the same text. It would be a very different thing to do this separately from this text. And that’s why I think the expansion is important.

That makes sense.

The pairing of Cathy and Adam is interesting. Terrible things happened to both of them when they were young. Cathy’s reaction was to grab it all and to put herself in command of it. Adam’s was, in some ways, to let it wash over him. The results can both lead to great harm or success. But they are paired in that way too, in the early trauma. Just as the story itself endlessly talks about the duality of man and nature, those pairings and repairings can go on endlessly.

Lee essentially becomes a parent to Aron and Cal, and I know you’re a father too. What did you channel from your own relationship to fatherhood?

My son is actually in the room here. It’s the biggest cliché imaginable, but fatherhood changes you. You feel like somebody has either activated some part of your DNA that lay dormant, or they’ve swapped you out for someone else. Being a father, the thing you sometimes don’t reckon with is the idea that your entire dynamic range as a human being suddenly expands. Almost in an instant. Like, the speed with which that happens is alarming. And suddenly you realize your capacity for love has tripled, but it’s accompanied by your capacity for fear. All of it gets bigger and deeper.

Lee recognizes that expansion in himself by caring for these kids. And what he thought he was looking for to expand his own life was happening under his nose in the loving of these children. It’s the fear for them that gives him the courage to confront Adam, right? He says that he didn’t want to communicate with Lau because he didn’t live up to expectations and that he’s only ever been a servant. He comes to a place where service is what eventually leads him to the family that he wanted. One of the lines that’s really key for him is “Being needed is hard bait for a lonely man.”

That’s a beautiful line.

You could litigate this entire story as people struggling against their own impulse to be alone. And Lee is one of those people that is very much the opposite. He is forced to be alone and he struggles to try to be a part of something. And he feels that because of his ethnicity and his outsider status in the world that he doesn’t have a choice but to be alone, but he doesn’t want that. He just thinks he has to make peace with it.

You know, Adam’s ultimate redemption is that he chooses not only to not be alone himself, but by accepting Cal, he also avoids that trap that Lee articulates in the naming of the kids. He doesn’t reject him. He doesn’t condemn Cal to that hell of rejection that he suffered.

And he’s surrounded by people who love him when he dies.

That’s right. I will say this on a technical level—people don’t see it a lot of the times, but it says a lot about the company. The role that Lee plays and the authority that he carries, it’s entirely predicated on the other actors. If the other actors don’t make themselves vulnerable, don’t surrender authority, and don’t surrender status to Lee, the audience won’t feel it. The audience doesn’t understand that that’s how he’s supposed to be interpreted. Joseph Zada and Joe Anders, just like the rest of us, felt the weight of responsibility of the text. Their ability to demonstrate love to Lee and cede authority to Lee is really what makes Lee work.

In the same way, one of the things that Chris does shockingly well is that simple thing that all actors are supposed to do, which is he leans most heavily on listening. And for a verbal character like Lee and a verbal person like myself, that’s an act of generosity that gives Lee more space to try to grow into.

Right. So much of Christopher’s performance is in his eyes. It feels like you’re watching theater.

Yeah. And to find an actor and a partner where that’s what they want to do—it’s one of those things that’s easier said than done. And he’s truly special at it. It speaks to what he thinks is important and a very quiet confidence to be able to do that.

Is there anything else that’s important for readers to know?

With respect to East of Eden, there were so many bars set within the text itself. Zoe’s adaptation, Florence’s talented performance, Chris’s partnership. If people give you the opportunity to fail at that level, you have to run at it. I’m gonna jump at that thing, because you don’t get that many shots at it. I don’t take that for granted at all—that I’ve been given a lot of opportunities in a very short amount of time to try to level up in that way. And I’m really, really grateful for that. At every phase of Eden in particular, I felt like if it never went any further, I still would have come out ahead.