> By Corina Knoll  

> Photograph by Eric Sueyoshi

 

 

 

He can’t bend space and time like his best friend Hiro, and even though he’s pretty much relegated to the role of sidekick, Ando Masahashi has a lot to do with saving the world. Since leaving their desk jobs in Tokyo, Ando and Hiro (who discovered he can teleport) have been running from mobsters and stealing swords, all in the name of changing a future that includes the bombing of New York. While Hiro is the one with the superpower, it has become clear that both men are destined to become “Heroes.”

“The writers really love writing for our storyline,” says James Kyson Lee, 31, who portrays Ando, the wide-eyed companion on the NBC hit series. “They’ve created this sort of modern-day odd couple. They call us the new Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis combo.”

The two characters speak primarily in Japanese (with subtitles), which makes for plenty of fish-out-of-water scenarios, with Lee playing Lewis to Hiro’s Martin, especially when he’s trying to impress women.

“He seems to wear his heart on his sleeve,” says “Heroes” writer Joe Pokaski of Lee. “You get his emotions on his face. He has really amazing comic timing and can be funny and heartbreaking at the same time.”

While the first season will come to a close this month, “Heroes” will return in the fall, and Lee has already been signed on as a series regular.

It’s a moment of stability that the East Coast native savors, considering his first night in Los Angeles was spent in his rental car. At 25, he arrived from Boston on a one-way ticket, with scant knowledge of the city and little cash in his wallet.

“I was going to go to a hostel in Venice, but when I got there the vibe was really weird,” Lee remembers. “It was already night. I was driving and I ended up in some parking lot of a big mall. I was tired from the flight so I fell asleep.”

More than five years later, Lee is sitting in a sushi dive just across the street from Sunset Gower studios, where “Heroes” is filmed. Dressed in a casual button-down shirt and jeans, the clean-cut Lee is animated and cheerful. In between slurps of udon, he talks about his days studying theater at Los Angeles City College.

“Because it was part of a city college, it was under city-college tuition — it was the cheapest conservatory style you could get,” he says. “It wasn’t Juilliard, but you got what you put into it.

“I felt like 20 years of creativity just becoming unleashed, like whooooosh! For the first time, I felt like I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

Born in Seoul, then raised in Changwon, Lee didn’t arrive in the States until he was 10. He and his parents moved to New York to live with family who had already immigrated. At one point, there were a dozen people living in the same house.