‘Hawaii Five-0’ Alum Grace Park Breaks Silence Over ‘Charged’ Exit

Grace Park finally opened up about her exit from CBS’ Hawaii Five-0, saying she is “good leaving the boys’ club” and looking forward to where her career is going next.

In June 2017, Park and co-star Daniel Dae Kim made headlines by leaving Hawaii Five-0 after salary negotiations failed. At the time, Variety reported that Park and Kim were both offered less than their white co-stars, Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan, to return for an eighth season. CBS then said it offered the two actors “significant salary increases,” and executive producer Peter M. Lenkov appeared to insinuate that Park was leaving to be with her family.

While Kim spoke out about the situation multiple times, Park never commented until she sat down with Entertainment Weekly this week to promote her next series, ABC‘s A Million Little Things.

“The whole situation was just a bit too charged for me,” Park said. However, she was not happy with Lenkov’s tweet and told him so.

“I let him know, ‘That wasn’t cool that you made a statement on my behalf.’… I know he did it to be helpful, and I care about Peter as a person, but I didn’t leave for that reason,” she told EW.

Still, Park did not want to explain why she really left the show, saying there was a “number of factors” that led to her exit.

“I know that people are always trying their best, and everyone’s coming from their own backgrounds. Throughout the whole series, I kept trying to see the best in everybody,” Park said. “Would I do it all over again? I wouldn’t be so quick to say yes.… I’m still figuring stuff out. Sometimes people are just really good at burying stuff, and I think I’m like that.”

Kim first commented on the situation in a long Facebook post, then elaborated further in August 2017 when he was promoting his next project, The Good Doctor. The actor is a producer on the ABC series.

“All good things come to an end. I close that chapter on Hawaii Five-0 and I begin this new chapter on The Good Doctor,” Kim said. “And I couldn’t be more excited to be back at ABC where I started my career in earnest and to be working with such incredible people. This is the start of something new, and I’m really grateful for that, too.”

As for Park, she said she is looking forward to the next step in her career, playing Katherine on A Million Little Things.

“I’m good leaving the boys’ club, and I’m hopeful for the future,” Park told EW. “I just look at this time as something that I went through. I didn’t understand it while I was going through it, but…. You can’t always get back what you lost, but if you made it through, right now is the best time to watch the old structures fall.”

A Million Little Things starts on Wednesday, Sept. 26 at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.

Photo credit: Norman Shapiro/CBS