Inside a tiny Italian restaurant just a skip from the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, one very familiar face is eulogizing the work of classic playwrights like Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov.

“There’s so much going on in there,” he says above the sizzle of the nearby kitchen. “And just before I moved here, when I was still living in New York, I had a chance to produce The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter, again, another amazing playwright. A short one-act and the words are very sparse. I don’t know if you know Pinter very well — he says a lot of things through his silences. … When there’s silence, you’re able to really fill out the character and not have just a mouthful of words all the time, but do things by a look or a movement.”

Abstruse stuff, those Pinter plays, and not the kind of thing you’d expect to hear lauded by Tim Kang. The 35-year-old actor is, after all, known for being incredibly, uh, commercial.

You’ve probably seen his work: He’s the technician sporting goggles and a lab coat testing gasoline quality for Shell. He’s also the dad easily duped by his wife and daughter into a future shopping trip to Home Depot. And for three consecutive years, he was the deadpanning dude whose Cingular cell phone always worked during March Madness.
So while Kang studied acting at Harvard and speaks fervently about obscure dramatists, he’s more likely to be known to the general public as “that Asian guy in all the commercials” (as one blog puts it).

One would be hard-pressed, however, to get Kang to see himself as the marketable Asian American Everyman.

“I don’t even know that I’m that high-profile when it comes to commercials,” he says. “If you‘re telling me that I am, I guess it’s good because as they say any publicity is good publicity. However, I don’t really feel it.”

He will admit that the ads have prompted recognition from strangers (usually, “Hey, you’re the Shell guy!” Or, “I know you. Did we take a class in college together?”) and that commercial work can be a nice breather from taking oneself too seriously. “When something like Cingular comes in, it’s just fun to go out there and be a goofball.”

Anyway, Kang wasn’t always a theater maven. Born Yila Tim Kang in San Francisco, the son of a nurse and a journalist (his father was the publisher of the Korea Daily News) and the eldest of three brothers, Kang graduated from Berkeley with a degree in political science. Shortly afterward, he moved to Hawaii where he surfed days and bartended nights. It was there that he discovered scuba diving, a diversion that has taken him to Thailand and the Phillippines.

“When you’re in a dive group and you see a school of Jack fish and there’s 300 of them just swimming right by you and they’re weaving this way and you’re in the middle of it — it’s a pretty amazing feeling.” (Kang also dabbles in skydiving, taekwondo, golf and makes visits to the gun range.)