You might know of Anderson .Paak as a Grammy-winning musician, but his latest flex includes adding actor and director to his resumé.
In his new movie, K-pop!, which debuted at several film festivals over the past couple of years but will be released at AMC theaters across the country today. Paak plays BJ, a flailing drummer working at a karaoke bar in LA. It’s here that he swiftly falls for an emo-coded Korean-American woman named Yeji.
After a steamy love affair, they split, and BJ continues to perform at the same karaoke bar for years. A little while later, he gets the opportunity to go to South Korea and play the drums as part of the backup band on Wildcard, a fictional K-pop competition show. That’s where he meets Tae Young, one of the promising young contestants, who BJ discovers is his son (spoiler, but not really).
The project is deeply personal and at times, hyper-specific for .Paak—Tae Young is played by Soul Rasheed, .Paak’s real-life son. The movie centers on the power of music to unite cultures, a concept .Paak is intimately familiar with (his mother is half Korean and Black). Although .Paak was always aware that he was part Korean; he didn’t know much about Korean culture until he met his ex-wife, Jae Lin.
