Randall Park is a good sport. When the interview predictably opens with a crack about John Krasinski, he laughs it off. “I will never tire of that joke,” he assures Timid, referring to his cameo on The Office (US) that’s followed him around since.
Of course, that is not all Park is known for. He started with a role in little known feature film Will Unplugged, and over a career that spans two decades, he’s starred in a veritable range of iconic characters. He charmed audiences as Louis Huang in Fresh Off the Boat, founder of Cattleman’s Ranch (NOT a Golden Saddle franchise, thank you very much) and Dad of the newly immigrant Huang family. He also played smarmy war hero Danny Chung in Veep, who never missed a chance to remind people of the soldier he pulled out of a burning tank. And who can forget the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s favorite recurring secret agent and resident card tricks extraordinaire Jimmy Woo?
Now, Park is back as FBI special agent Edwin Park in Shondaland’s latest series The Residence, a whodunit rumored to rival Knives Out in the television space. Led by an irrepressible Uzo Aduba as a Benoit Blanc-esque Cordelia Cupp, The Residence trailer reveals a murder has happened in the White House. The eight hour-long episodes will see Cupp, accompanied by a harried Edwin Park, sifting through 132 rooms, 157 suspects, and about a hundred different social dynamics to get to the bottom of the mystery.
“I was blown away by the script when I first read it,” says Park ahead of the show’s release. “There were so many different tones and genres going on through so many characters, I thought ‘oh gosh, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep track!’ but Paul William Davies wrote it with such clarity.”
Davies has previously worked with Shonda Rhimes on Scandal, another show set adjacent to the White House. “The Residence is honestly a lot of things,” he told Cosmopolitan. “It’s funny, it’s suspenseful, it’s clever, it’s totally farcical in places. It’s genuinely romantic and others.”
When Park first came across The Residence, he knew it was a great script but didn’t know if it would be a great show. “There'd be jokes in the action lines that no one will ever see except the reader,” he says, smiling. For example, Davies would add little personal details about himself in some of the directions, or describe a room and then put in parentheses “if we have the budget.”
Shows and films set in the White House typically lean heavily on sequences featuring rappelling down the walls, tense political standoffs, and dramatic conversations about the future of the country. The Residence’s playful approach endeared itself to Park as “tonally different.”
“I wondered how [Davies] would translate that spirit into the show. Clearly, it’s all there.”
It helped that the combined Netflix and Shondaland resources enabled the show to reconstruct large parts of the White House in painstaking detail for the cast to get in character. There were so many sound stages that “we basically took over an entire studio,” says Park. “From what I learned, the sets were incredibly accurate, probably closest to the real thing. Our production designer François [Audouy] was just so obsessive about getting everything right.”
Special agent Edwin Park might seem familiar to fans who have seen the MCU’s Jimmy Woo over the years. Woo is an FBI agent initially assigned to monitor Scott Lang’s (Antman) parole. He also appeared in Wandavision and the Antman sequels, complete with card tricks he picked up on the way. Park agrees that Edwin is a more “world-weary” version of Woo, who is rather goofy and lovable.
“Going into production, I did think about how he was different from Woo,” says Park. “Woo is such an upbeat character whereas Edwin is really good at his job but is very lost in the shadow of Cordelia Cupp.”
The combination of Randall Park and Uzo Aduba is not one that has been done before but feels like the most natural thing in the world. The show description says Cupp feels like she “doesn’t need help so she feels like Edwin is just there to watch her, to make sure she doesn’t get into any trouble,” which leads to a tense, antagonistic dynamic in the beginning.
“He’s very, very exasperated, but wants to learn and also knows he has something to offer.” Park grins. “It’s very Sherlock Holmes and Watson,” he adds, a cheeky nod at his ongoing role as James Moriarty in the CBS show Watson.
The Residence cast list is stacked with a formidable roster of diverse talent, which includes Susan Kelechi-Watson, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Lee, and also Kylie Minogue as herself. The elephant in the room, however, is that the White House in The Residence could not be more different from the one currently in operation.
When Trump came into power earlier this year, he signed an executive order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” Since then, according to a Bloomberg News analysis, approximately 20% of companies in the S&P 100 have gone back on their DEI commitments, including Meta, Amazon, and Target.
How does it feel for the show to come out in an environment like this?
“It’s not an overtly political show,” muses Park. “It’s really a murder mystery, but there are a lot of quietly subversive things about the show that do make a quiet statement.”
The fact that it has a diverse cast was never a preset agenda. “It’s an organically diverse show,” he says. “For example, there’s a President and his husband. I feel like it’s such a smart way to present ideas, especially in a modern world, without really making a big deal out of them.”
“Just to be like, it is what it is, and it’s great, you know?”
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The Residence premieres March 20, 2025 on Netflix.
