Stepping Out
Joel Kim Booster Is Just Getting Started
The Loot star gets candid about his onstage persona and where he wants to take his career next.
Joel Kim Booster has had quite the year. From a small voice acting role in Netflix’s biggest film of all time, KPop Demon Hunters (“if they do a sequel, Romance is still available to be the new villain,” he says of his character); to filming ABC’s highly-anticipated Scrubs reboot (the OG cast members have been “so gracious and welcoming and so amped to have this new blood”); to Season 3 of his Emmy-nominated Apple TV+ series, Loot, Booster’s been booked and busy. “You want to conquer everything, and I want to diversify for my own sake,” the 37-year-old actor, writer, and producer says over a Diet Coke at the rooftop lounge of New York’s Equinox Hotel, where he’s staying as he does promo for Loot.
In the series (dropping new episodes through Dec. 10), Booster plays Nicholas — the vain, witty, and fiercely loyal assistant to Maya Rudolph’s Molly Wells, who becomes the richest woman in the world after her divorce from a tech billionaire CEO. “She makes it really easy to pretend to be best friends with her, honestly,” he says of Rudolph. “There’s very little separation between her and the rest of the cast. She’s not siloed off in her dressing room or her trailer. She’s in the mud with the rest of us watching TikTok videos, shooting sh*t, and making jokes.”
This season marks something of a departure for Booster’s character, whose story lines in the past have been partly inspired by Booster’s own life; now, Nicholas is having struggles wholly his own. “It’s sort of a relief,” Booster says. “It’s not that I want to be greedy or selfish, but this isn’t necessarily the platform in which I’d be able to get as deep on some of these issues. It’s not my show; it’s Maya’s show.”
In the past, the Chicago native mined his personal experiences for stand-up routines, turning his childhood tales and struggles of growing up as a gay Korean kid raised by a white Evangelical family into comedy fodder. His specials, Model Minority and Psychosexual, mine those experiences and cultural nuances to create edgy, thought-provoking routines centered on identity that attracted a dedicated LGBTQ+ following. But his onstage persona never fully gelled with his real self either. “I would say it’s 30% of my personality blown up to the nth degree for entertainment purposes,” he says of his high-energy stage presence. “When they first meet me, people assume I’m being standoffish or cold or aloof. I’m a much more introverted person than people expect me to be.”
Booster longs to take his stories beyond the comedy stage. He looks back on writing and starring in Hulu’s Emmy-winning Fire Island — a gay rom-com inspired by Pride and Prejudice, starring Asian American actors like Bowen Yang and Conrad Ricamora — as the “greatest period of my life.” Even if he’s a little uncomfortable with how it was received by the press, which hailed the 2022 film for depicting Asian and LGBTQ+ romance and ushering in a new era of queer representation. “I get really embarrassed when people maybe overstate the importance of my film,” he muses. “I am so grateful that it is so important to so many people. But I also have this sense of ‘God, I hope in 10 years that it doesn’t have to feel like an important movie anymore.’”
“It was hard enough getting one movie made; it’s been very hard getting a second made,” he says. He’s still writing new stuff, and selling some projects, though they often fall through. “Eventually, I want to have my own production company and be somebody who can uplift other voices as well.” For now, Booster is perfectly happy learning from greats like Rudolph and exploring new opportunities as he awaits his next big break as a writer.
He’s not taking just any project, though. Unlike his Loot co-star Ron Funches, who will compete on the fourth season of The Traitors — “I don’t have any tea, unfortunately,” he informs me with a glum look — Booster turned down the opportunity to be a part of Season 3. To say he regrets the decision is an understatement. “At the time, I didn’t want to be a contestant on a reality show,” he says. “I ran the risk of going on Traitors and having that be the thing most straight people in America know me from, and I didn’t want that. The irony is I ended up doing reality TV and making an absolute mess of it.”
That “absolute mess” was his stint as the host of Bravo’s dating show Love Hotel, which brought four women from the Real Housewives franchise to a resort in hopes of finding love. Booster caused controversy the day after production wrapped, sharing a heated Instagram message claiming that one of the stars — whom Bravo fans quickly speculated was Shannon Beador — treated the crew as “subhuman.” Booster later apologized for his words, but maintains Love Hotel was an experience that he’d rather not repeat. “As someone who’s hosted a lot of comedy shows and done other hosting, I thought it would be a pretty easy transition. But that job is a very specific job. It’s not something that you can just slip into,” he says. (That said, Booster still loves Bravo and plans to catch up on the Real Housewives of Miami reunion in his hotel room later, warning me not to spoil it: “I need to experience it myself.”)
Scrubs, on the other hand, has been nothing but “a joy” to work on so far. Booster isn’t preoccupied by the production at all, but rather how it’ll be received — as his first project for broadcast TV, the show will introduce him to mainstream America. “As my partner [John-Michael Sudsina] likes to point out, it will probably be the one thing straight people know me from in America after it airs,” he quips. “Being perceived by straight people for the first time, that’s going to be something new.”
