We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris Naoki Lee a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Chris, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
Starting us off strong with a deep question, huh? I like it!
Well, the presence of confidence and self esteem has evolved quite a bit over my life. Confidence felt so much easier as a kid. Less responsibility, less stakes. I read somewhere recently how in order for you to be successful, you must be confident, and in order to be confident, you must be successful. It’s that chicken and the egg conundrum. Which one comes first?
I recall my first major run of confidence came from dancing. I wasn’t afraid to show up and show out to leave my heart on the dance floor — it didn’t hurt that I was also mildly good at it. I could pick up choreography, I could create my own, I had a style that influenced how I moved around the world physically and emotionally. It drew more people around me. Even in a time when dancing for guys was shunned (think prototypical late 90s, early 00s middle to high school era) and wasn’t seen as cool, I was able to shift the narrative around my social group because of that confidence. That confidence certainly helped with my self esteem.
I found that as I grew older, it became a different kind of challenge to not only maintain that confidence, but to grow and level up your self esteem. Being in the entertainment industry, and an actor at that when I first started, a lot of my work was based on other peoples’ approval. You have to audition and you have to be selected over 100s of people if not more. The booking rate for any actor is mind numbingly staggering, and just imagine a young Asian kid in that time period trying to find work that was practically non-existent or built around negative tropes. It was certainly hard. But I never lost the confidence of knowing *this* is the process. This is what it takes. Every rejection would build resilience. I would learn not to hinge my esteem or confidence based around bookings, which would naturally feel like big news. Instead, I would lean on the little victories along the way: a callback, networking with collaborators, productive feedback from a casting director, producers calling me in specifically because they knew my past work. Over time, the experience and relationships I’ve garnered along the way helped pave the path to keep me working in this competitive industry.
For me, confidence is now about being present. I can time travel a lot in my head, anticipating what’s to come or analyzing what moves were made, but it’s when I am at my most present self is when I am most confident and understanding of my worth. It takes practice, and I certainly fall off the wagon here and there, but I make an active effort to remind myself, “hey I’m right here.” That grounded knowledge allows me to be grateful and confident — so to come full circle, sometimes I just dance or bob my head to that imaginary beat, and find myself back in the moment again.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
So I do a little bit of everything in the Film&TV industry, as cliché as that may sound now. I’ve been in this business for over 25 years, starting off as an actor — I still remember my very first audition. It was for a Disney promo and I recall my mother running water through my hair in the kitchen sink. I’d lean over and she’d rinse out all the guck and dirt you’d accumulate as a serial middle school recess hooligan. I recall my nerves, or really lack thereof, perhaps because of my naiveté, but I went into that audition room with a fervor that I still try to recapture to this day. The casting director gave me direction before we started: to imagine seeing the Disneyland parade for the very first time. I nodded, closed my eyes, got in the moment, and threw caution to the wind.
It was my first professional audition. And I booked it.
Still too young to understand the nuances of validation and the origins of confidence, I took that booking to heart knowing I was in the right place. This was my pocket. After joining SAG at 12 years old and working intermittently in LA, I took a break and graduated from NYU with a theatre major, then moved back home to LA and promptly moved out of my parent’s place to thrust myself in the unforgiving world.
Over these two and half decades, I’ve had the privilege of recurring on prestigious shows like AMC’s ‘The Terror,’ and Apple TV+’s ‘Mythic Quest,’ producing and writing my directorial debut film, ‘Dinner Party,’ which was distributed by Vertical Entertainment and premiered at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, and further cementing myself in the voice acting and performance capture world of video games like ‘Starfield,’ and ‘NBA2K23.’ I’m currently developing a few projects that span from feature films, animated series, to a Sci-Fi epic saga. I’m looking forward to sharing more details once they get further along.
A nonprofit that I’d also like to put a little light on today is AAMI (Asian Americans for Mental Illness), run by my good friend, An Phan, and it specializes in mental health particularly for the AAPI community in the entertainment industry. The conversations of mental health within our AAPI diaspora and the community at large has always had layers of stigma around it. Much of that can be attributed to the wider community’s traditional culture as well as generational upbringings that have taught us to bulldoze through our pain with work and distractions rather than talk about them head on. AAMI aims to de-stigmatize a lot of those misguided perceptions, and allow a line of communications and resources for those who need it in the industry. I had the chance to work with An and AAMI, and they’ll have more interviews (one of which I was lucky to be a part of) coming in 2024.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Alright, don’t hate, but I’m gonna give you four! I’ll aim to keep it short, but whenever I do coaching, I try to instill these four qualities to others, and these areas of knowledge have certainly impacted my journey in positive ways.
Balance. I try to live a balanced approach, to not get too high or low when it comes to life’s swings (as you may know can be a LOT sometimes), but my perceptions of balance have definitely shifted over the years (and remember, that’s totally okay — to change your mind. Your principles don’t have to be hard coded, but can evolve as you do). Now, I try to think of living my life in balance, but with contrast. So when you feel the highs, really celebrate and enjoy them, take stock in that moment. When life is low, don’t deny it, don’t run away from it. Embrace that moment because *this too shall pass.* That contrast in life allows you to find a balance that doesn’t feel mundane, but also doesn’t feel suffocating during swings.
Trust. This is hard for artists like myself. Sometimes, it’s hard to trust what we’re doing is the *right* thing. It can be hard to trust the process when nearly all the stats tell you you’re fighting a losing battle for sustained success in this industry. But for that reason, you gotta have that blind trust that there is light at the end of the tunnel. I booked my very first video game in 2020, and I was supposed to go in the recording booth on March 12th. Our country shutdown the day before and I, like many others in different industries, lost the job. As devastated as I was (and added stress of uncertainty with an incoming pandemic), I still had to trust the process. About a half year later, I got a call from a video game studio that had a connection to that first game I booked, and they offered me a role for a AAA video game. Things happen in mysterious ways, more often than not that is out of our control, so I try to apply that patience when it comes to trust.
Accountability. We all live our own ways, have our own triggers that make us shell into a ball under our bed and not deal with whatever is in front of us. But there comes a time when you have to be accountable and take action. I’m certainly no saint, I’ve had moments where I’ve had the instinct to place blame on everyone else but me, but I’m grateful that I can stop and ask myself “what could you have done differently here?” “Was this actually on you? If so, how do you own up to it?” Ego is a — I’m guessing I can’t curse here — but it’s a thing. Ego can be great for you when it comes to understanding your value and confidence, but it can definitely hold you back on your journey. You have to know when it’s time for you to set your ego aside and be accountable. This comes with time, but you can speed this up a bit just by having genuine, likeminded individuals surrounding you. You’re the average of the five people you interact with most. Accountability is contagious, so it’s always great to have that around you.
Curiosity. I remember in my 20s, I looked around a lot. I was watching my friends’ get promoted in their 9 to 5s, lurking on social to see my peers booking jobs. It led me to compare, to be more judgmental. I made it a point for myself to shift that energy away from a negative space, and look at life more curiously. Ask more questions. The more I asked with genuine intent, the less I projected. I know it can be hard when the wins aren’t coming in, or you’re going through a tough moment in your relationships, so seeing other peoples’ rose-tinted curated content can trigger thought loops that aren’t productive for you. But I tell myself that we’re all fighting our own battles and going on our journeys at our own pace. We simply don’t know what the next person is going through, so in the end, be curious. Not judgmental.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
I’m always looking for likeminded individuals. Whether on the production or talent side, I’m eager to collaborate with people who understand that it takes a village, who aren’t afraid to be bold and take chances. There’s always a calculated risk involved, but we stack the deck better if we do it together. No one’s better than the next person, we’re just out here trying to do the dang thing! They understand that they gotta be diligent in putting in the work, but also have that space to have constructive dialogue, and as a director, I always try to tune myself to a synergy that will match the collective of people I’m working with.
Beyond that — since this happens to be relevant, I’m also looking to collaborate with Japanese or Asian producers who may be interested in helping me tell a true story about a young man who fled California’s internment camps during World War 2. It’s based on a book that I recently adapted, and I’m eager to find collaborators who want to bring this story to life. I know the AAPI diaspora within the industry is growing, so to be able to connect even further with that community is definitely a goal of mine.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.chrisnaokilee.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrisnaokilee
- Other: https://www.threads.net/@chrisnaokilee
Image Credits
Noah Lance, Logan Walcher
