The Undeniable Joel Kim Booster (2024)

Back in college, Joel Kim Booster wrote a one-act play called Layover, about a guy passing through Chicago who gets snowed in after his ex-girlfriend has died by suicide. The guy bunks for a while with the ex’s estranged sister, who is desperate to figure out who the dead woman really was. Booster was striving for emotional seriousness—depth à la “a nineteen-year-old’s version of what f*cked-up is.” And sure enough, after the show a young woman came up to him so moved that she was in tears.

Booster had been performing his whole life, but until that moment he hadn’t clicked into the power of dramatic writing. Nearly two decades later, with pride still plain in his voice, the thirty-six-year-old actor, comedian, and screenwriter clarifies: By the way, that serious play was actually pretty funny. But when you’re nineteen, you think the most powerful writing in the world makes people cry. It’s not until you’re a little older, when you’ve lived a little or a lot—and maybe built a career in stand-up comedy—that you learn the truth: The real power is in making people laugh. A genuine laugh, one that comes from deep down and takes your breath away, is something you can’t fake.

A belly laugh also makes a bold assertion—like, say, billionaires probably shouldn’t exist—go down easy. That’s more or less the message at the heart of Loot, which returned to Apple TV+ for season 2 on April 3. On the series, a workplace comedy even your most strident socialist friends would approve of, Booster plays Nicholas, the cold, judgmental consigliere to Maya Rudolph’s Molly Novak, a tech billionaire’s ex-wife in the vein of MacKenzie Bezos. “I remember getting the breakdown for this role,” he says, “and it was like snarky gay assistant from—I think they said Indiana—who’s formerly homeschooled or something like that. And I was like, if I don’t book this role, then I need to reconsider my entire career trajectory.”

The character’s bio superficially maps onto Booster’s real life if you substitute Illinois for Indiana, but he’s nothing like Nicholas. He’s amiable and warm, even on a freezing February afternoon when he’s under the weather (an array of health-forward beverages are lined up before him), and almost unbelievably gracious and easygoing. An example of that grace? We met a couple months after The Hollywood Reporter confused him with his Fire Island costar Bowen Yang, and despite his frustration, he expressed sympathy for the journalist: “These publications are not staffed well anymore. It’s all skeleton crews. . . . Everyone’s overworked and underpaid.”

For years, Booster has mined his biography for stand-up material, even though the version of himself he plays onstage is “like 30 percent of what’s inside me, and it’s mostly put on.” The line for which he’s most famous is probably “I knew I was gay before I knew I was Asian,” from his 2017 Comedy Central special. Some people, he thinks, will likely always know him for that. In this season of Loot, Nicholas will resemble Joel a little more: The writers decided the character was adopted by white parents, just like Booster. He was into it right away because of how natural the representation of a transracial adoption comes across. Nicholas’s parents just show up onscreen and no one loses their mind.

Away from Loot, Booster is now working on a new hour of stand-up material that marks a “reinvention” for him. Much of his earlier stand-up played off the audience’s expectations of him. He’d set up a bit with the boastful phrase “As a hot person. . .” For a while, the joke felt subversive; getting an audience to laugh along with you after that proclamation is hard. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe they weren’t exactly laughing with him. In the new hour, “a lot of it is about confidence, and it’s a lot about refinding confidence in doing this and figuring out if there is a point of view left in me that has anything interesting to say.”

With age has come humility. Back when he was working a day job and doing open mics at night, “you could not have told me that I was not a genius, that where I’m at now wasn’t inevitable,” he says. “And now that I’m here, I’m like, sitting at the Emmys like, ‘What the f*ck am I doing here?’” What he’s doing now is what he’s been doing since he was nineteen: crushing it. But this time, the tears are from laughter.

Watch Loot on AppleTV+

Photographs by: Jason Kibbler
Styling by: Nick Sullivan
Grooming by: Devra Kinery
Hair by: Dennis Lanni