A few days ago, Hawaii Five-0’s Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park decided to leave the CBS series, with rumors suggesting that their departure had something to do with the network refusing to pay them the same amount of money as their co-stars Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan. All four of them had been on the show since the beginning, so the suggestion was that this lack of pay equality was related to the fact that O’Loughlin and Caan are white and Kim and Park are not.
Now, Kim has shared a statement about leaving the show on Facebook, and while he doesn’t explicitly say that the pay dispute was because of race, it is fairly clearly implied. Kim says he was ready to come back to the show, but he and CBS “weren’t able to agree to terms on a new contract,” so he “made the difficult choice” to walk away from the series. He also says that knows how difficult it can be for an Asian-American actor to find a good role like his Hawaii Five-0 character, but he believes that it’s important to “look beyond the disappointment of this moment to the bigger picture,” adding, “the path to equality is rarely easy.”
You can see his full post below.