Harry Shum Jr, Glee
Harry Shum Jr: thank you for being another Asian American role model. I touched upon him briefly in another Glee post, but let’s get a bit deeper into his profile. Let’s start with his most visible role to date which is his character in Glee.
In the hit Fox show Glee, Harry Shum Jr plays the role of Michael Chang who doesn’t have as much time singing, but he is definitely the go-to guy when it comes to dancing. These days, the Asian American male being strictly a nerdy dork is probably waning due to shows such as America’s Best Dance Crew which have many Asian males in the best if not the winning crews. When it comes to sitcoms and movies portraying this, it’s starting to come around though having a major character representation isn’t exactly there.
Even within Glee, he is not a major character though he is starting to get some more screen time, and things may be changing for Harry soon! E!Online has reported that Harry Shum Jr will get a promotion to be a regular character next season! You can read the article via the link at the bottom of the article though the funny thing is that the picture in the article includes the character played by Chord Overstreet when he isn’t mentioned at all. I don’t want to read into it too much though I do wonder if some foolish editor thought it would be too hard to feature an Asian male alone?
So how did Harry get to this spot? He was born to Chinese parents in Costa Rica and lived there for about 5-6 years before heading off to San Francisco. It wasn’t until high school that Harry started dancing when he tried out for the dance team on a dare! This grew into choreography and soon the jocks and football players started joining the dance team. Sound a bit like Glee?
This parlayed into other opportunities including being the silhouette dancer in iPod commercials…for about a dozen of them! He was also fortunate enough to dance with Beyonce and J. Lo. Add onto that a few dance movies, and his recent venture into an online dancing show called LXD (The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers) on Hulu, and you can see the talent and success he has had. Let’s hope for more to come and others to follow his lead.
One interesting thing to note from his Yellow Magazine article is that even though his parents weren’t thrilled, they supported him in his decision. Good thing for us!
E!Online Article
Vanity Fair interview with Harry
Article and for the ladies, it includes a shirtless picture of Harry in Yellow Magazine
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