Charles Melton Keeps Breaking Boundaries

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In Ry Russo-Young’s The Sun Is Also a Star, Yara Shahidi and Charles Melton play two teenagers who are so mismatched it could only mean true love. She is an astronomer in the making, an over-prepared and over-planned rationalist on perhaps her last day in the city she has called home for years. He is a daydreamer and romantic who talks endlessly of fate and destiny, set firmly on the doctor track but with fantasies of becoming a writer. He saves her life, then insists they spending the day working through the New York Times’ famous “Thirty-Six Questions That Lead to Love.” They sit under a swirling night sky at the Hayden Planetarium, then sleep under the real one in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The title comes from a complaint lodged by Shahidi’s Natasha, whose cold analysis is that the sun, our most important star, gets short shrift from dreamers who only have eyes for more distant flames. Melton’s Daniel promises in return to only write poems about the sun from now on. The exchange is indicative of the vast difference between them, but also of how little that divide matters in the end when the heart gets involved.

Currently best known for his role as Reggie Mantle on the dark teen drama Riverdale, Melton has made history as the first Asian-American actor to headline a teen romance from a major studio. Along with Shahidi, who is half black and half Iranian and plays the daughter of a Jamaican family, the two lead a film in which not a single white character speaks, a momentous step forward in diversity on screen that is handled smoothly enough that it doesn’t feel like it is trying to make a statement but rather is merely reflecting the way New York—and America—looks today. “I’m so used to seeing the Asian man being portrayed as the sidekick or the best friend or the jokester,” says Melton, who is half Korean and was born in Alaska before moving around constantly following a father who was in the army. “There’s this idea of Asian men where they’re not outspoken, they’re weak, they’re not romantic. This film goes beyond that stereotype.”

Indeed, with the exception of last year’s Crazy Rich Asians, it is nearly impossible to name any other mainstream films with an Asian man as the love interest, something Melton is proud to be doing his part to correct. There are more than a few reasons why it would be hard to imagine anyone else playing Daniel, the dearth of young Asian actors with the star power to hold their own opposite Shahidi being only one of them. He openly confesses that he worked hard to win the role, which he first learned about on Instagram when Nicola Yoon, the author of the original young adult novel, posted an announcement that her book was going to be adapted into a movie and asking who should play the male lead. “That same day, I woke up to being tagged by over two hundred fan accounts of hers saying it should be me,” he jokes, “fan accounts which I had made prior leading up to that.”

Melton went out and bought the book and began reading it the same day, saying that he quickly discovered in Daniel a counterpart of himself that he sometimes wishes he could be. “I was like, ‘This is me!’ The romanticism that Daniel Bae has was just reignited in me by reading that book,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is the version of me that isn’t jaded, that believes in love, that doesn’t guard his heart, that loves freely.’ There’s this fearlessness to him that I connected to. That’s something that I admire about Daniel, he’s just so present in the moment. I learned a lot about myself through his story.”

As the son of a Korean immigrant, Melton says he also understood the pressure Daniel faces to succeed in a white-collar profession, even if he never personally experienced it. On the day Daniel meets Natasha, he is meant to be preparing for his alumni interview for Dartmouth, where he is expected to enroll in pre-med, the rest of his life planned out by his parents since he picked a stethoscope over a gavel at his doljabi. Artistic sentimentalist that he is, Daniel wants to be a poet, but with an older brother who seems to have few aspirations beyond working at the family haircare store, he recognizes that the honor of the family relies on him. “Being first-generation Korean-American, I understood Daniel’s struggles with his identity,” Melton explains. “His parents moved to give him a better life and have been grooming him to be a doctor and he’s come to this crossroads of how far he is willing to compromise his own dreams and aspirations in order to accommodate what his parents want for him.”

That same day, Natasha is struggling with the precarious nature of the immigrant experience as well. After her father, who is in New York illegally, was caught in an immigration raid, her family is on the eve of being deported back to Jamaica and she is on her way to a high-powered immigration lawyer in a final attempt to avert that fate when Daniel pulls her out of the way of a speeding car. Published the month of Trump’s election, Yoon’s original novel earnestly made the case for immigration reform and it is hard not to watch the film without considering how much more common Natasha’s situation has become in the two-and-a-half years since. The political import is not lost on Melton, even as he aims to make a broader case for acceptance rather than calling for any specific legislative change. “I hope people walk away from the movie with a little more understanding that we are more alike than we are unalike,” he says. “The word ‘immigrant’ is looked at as a negative thing today and people fail to realize that this country was founded by immigrants. This movie really just humanizes them and shows you that they are people beyond whatever label the government wants to put on them.”

It may be hard to imagine that Melton’s début feature role is also the first of its kind in the entire history of film, but his path here has already been full of plenty of surprises. Growing up between South Korea, Tennessee, Kansas, Germany, and Texas, he says he learned to be malleable, a trait that has proven useful in his professional life. “I had to assimilate and adapt to my surroundings and learn how to communicate with people—not change who I am, but I had to be more open,” he explains. “It was scary at times, but now I have no fear in meeting somebody I don’t know.”

He played football through high school until he was sidelined by a severe injury and, with a resolve Daniel would appreciate, decided to move out to Los Angeles. “When it comes down to it, I’m a dreamer,” he says. “I drove out from Kansas with five hundred dollars in my bank account. My mother gave me sixty cans of chicken noodle soup and sixty packets of tuna. I knew nobody in LA and I went from modeling here and there to walking over three hundred dogs in two months to working Chinese takeout at Chin Chin in Brentwood. It’s been a journey, but everything played its part. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for those cans of chicken noodle soup.”

After bit parts in Glee and American Horror Story, Melton rose out of obscurity when he was cast as the antagonistic jock Reggie on the second season of the CW’s hit Riverdale replacing Ross Butler, who left the show for 13 Reasons Why. Based on the Archie comics, the series had already amassed a passionate following and the announcement of Melton’s arrival was met with heated discussions. Still, he says he managed to avoid the outside chatter by focusing on what he could bring to the role and, as he prepares to begin production shortly on the fourth season, he has clearly won over the audience. “I don’t believe in trying to do what someone else has done,” he offers. “You can only put your own spin on it, your own version, because of who you are.”

The show’s success has given him a platform to keep on “working different acting muscles” ever since. Having checked off the teen drama and the romance, he recently finished filming Bad Boys for Life, taking on his first action role opposite Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in the latest edition of their popular police comedy franchise, set for release early next year. Melton recognizes that, even in 2019, being an Asian-American actor still has its challenges, but he is quick to highlight the opportunities it provides as well—perhaps, he suggests, an exploration on Riverdale into the Asian heritage of Reggie Mantle, who was white in the original comics—as the industry makes a concerted effort to tell a wider range of stories.

Things have moved astonishingly quickly for Melton in the last two years, meaning he still carries an air of surprise and wonder at his current state of affairs. He sat through a few recent screenings of The Sun Is Also a Star, for example, surrounded by many impassioned fans but as engrossed in what was happening on the screen as he used to be as a kid growing up and heading to the cinema every week. “The movies were a form of escapism for me,” he recalls. “I could live my life through someone else’s shoes on the big screen and that was special. You go into a room and no one’s looking at you and it’s completely dark and the screen’s massive and you get lost in people’s stories. There’s something comforting and refreshing about that, watching someone else’s life and finding parts of yourself that you connect with. It’s magical to be able to be a part of that, to be on the other side of it while still getting lost in movies.”

The Sun Is Also a Star is out now. Bad Boys for Life is out January 17, 2020.