Justin H. Min and the Ethics of Belonging

Group chats can be exhausting enough and, for weeks, Justin H. Min belonged to one where, every day, he’d receive links to articles and podcasts about AI, data mining, and defense contracts. If that sounds like a new type of guerrilla doomscrolling, the actor found a sense of catharsis in the experience. The thread started during rehearsals for Matthew Libby’s new Off Broadway play, Data, which currently stars Min as a tech executive interested in buying a young programmer’s algorithm to assist with the government’s mass deportations. Min would spend his days rehearsing this increasingly harrowing scenario—which, as reality caught up to Libby’s play, required daily changes to the script—then go home and continue parsing through the nightmare with his castmates (Brandon Flynn, Sophia Lillis, and Karan Brar), director, and playwright.

“You actually could feel the shift in the audience,” Min recalls. “The material itself is heavy, but there was slightly more lightness in the audience during the first couple of previews, and then you could feel, as things in Minneapolis were happening, the weight of the play take new form. It became a much more terrifying thing.”

Add the fact that Min’s character, who works for the fictional Athena Technologies, is named Alex. “If you have any idea of what’s going on in the world,” Min remarks, “you know that Athena is quite based on Palantir,” whose CEO, Alex Karp, has become a headline regular. But for Min, actively engaging with the material and being able to manifest it onstage eight times a week kept it from feeling like mere doomscrolling: “I think there’s a passivity to just reading headlines and being depressed and existential about these things, but this was an ongoing conversation.”

It’s a typically thoughtful point of view from Min, who considers Data his first real foray into stage acting, although he’d done some regional theater back home in California, including the premiere of Luis Valdez’s Valley of the Heart in 2013. Best known for his work on the Netflix series Beef and The Umbrella Academy and the film After Yang, he’d long been pushing his team to find “any reason to get back onstage” and thought the play was a genuine page-turner. Though he grew up on the opposite end of the state from Silicon Valley, Min felt its pull on his classmates at Cornell University, many of whom majored in computer science with dreams of tech startups. “That culture is rampant at these elite institutions,” he observes.

He’s not one to judge too quickly, however, comparing the play’s central issue with what he calls “the plight of so many of my friends: How do we reconcile some of these big-picture philosophical and ethical questions with the day-to-day practicalities of trying to survive?” That’s a bind that also presents Min with an unavoidable point of comparison with Alex, who is also an Asian immigrant in a mostly white American industry. Exploring that tension within the character, he explains, is a main reason he took on the role.

“It would have been so easy to write him off as just a white guy doing evil things and wanting to deport all these immigrants, wanting to put numbers on people and dehumanize them,” he says. “Alex believes in the American dream and wants to uphold Western superiority because he has grown up here, has sacrificed everything to be here, and if the inevitability of this technology is going to happen, it should be in the hands of people like us who actually care.”

Alex is described in the script as Singapore-born with “multicultural East Asian parents,” which he leverages in his attempt to convince the programmer, who is of Indian descent, to join his team. The complexities of the Other’s double consciousness inform their relationship, and gave the second-generation Korean-American Min chills as he watched footage of Palantir’s Indian CTO justifying his actions. What does it mean to close the door behind you? The actor, deliberate in his words but never slow to respond, finally takes a beat.

“Man, I mean…we can talk for hours about that because that goes into all the things I’ve had to uncover and talk about in my own therapy,” he laughs. “I think for a lot of immigrants there’s this huge push for assimilation: succeed in the American system, get well-paying jobs, and work for a prestigious company. That’s just embedded into the values we have growing up. It’s a fascinating thing to feel like, your entire life, you’re working to assimilate and then finally coming at odds with what some of these companies are trying to do, which is maybe antithetical to who you are as a person.”

Min, who has been a UNICEF Ambassador since 2022, continues: “When we’re talking about immigration laws and all of the things that some of these companies tackle, it’s like, Wait, I’ve been trying my entire life to feel like I’m a part of this club, and now you’re telling me I’m not part of it because of my ethnic background? That tension, and what we do with it, is something a lot of people in immigrant communities struggle with.”

Self-exploration through art is not new to Min, who worked as a magazine writer before his acting career took off. His old Tumblr account is a frequent topic in interviews—he blushes but admits an affection for people who tell him they were ardent followers—and he mourns its loss of cultural relevance. This, he posits, might be a sign of our “losing longform content and slower, thinking content, in general, and that’s what Tumblr was; it was a place for people to share ideas and critical thought.” An avid journaler, he’s fleshed out his daily thoughts for years, and finally took to Substack about a year ago—his first public writing since the Tumblr days. Initially scared that his newfound visibility would inhibit his writing or prove too taxing in its vulnerability, he’s eased back into the habit, rediscovering comfort in knowing, one day, he’ll be able to look back and see “where you once were and where you are now, see some of the things you thought you were going to get over but still struggle with.”

“There’s something so liberating about writing, something that allows me to be open and honest in a way that I don’t think any other medium can for me,” he says. “I just love the ability to construct language in a way that feels very honest to my soul. Even acting, I’m a smaller piece of that puzzle because I’m being directed by someone. With writing, it feels fully me.”

Data continues through March 29 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York.