Dante Basco reflects on diversity in Hollywood as a child star: 'No one even knew what a Filipino was'

Dante Basco, also known as Rufio in the 1991 film, Hook, looks back at his career as a child star, and what it was like being diverse in Hollywood 35 years ago. He tells Yahoo Entertainment, "No one even knew what a Filipino was."

Video transcript

DANTE BASCO: When I came in 35 years ago to Hollywood, nobody-- there was no Asian-- A, there was no Asian roles. B, one even knew what a Filipino was.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- That's enough.

DANTE BASCO: My whole career in the industry, in the entertainment industry started at the ground level, and for me and my brothers, it was the actual ground. We were a breakdancing group called the Street Freaks in the streets of San Francisco in Berkeley, California. We were break dancers in the 80s. And then we ended up working as professional dancers for the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland A's. And then we got scholarships to San Francisco Ballet Company and we started studying ballet and did The Nutcracker and that kind of thing.

That kind of professionalism led us into coming to Hollywood, originally as dancers. But then we got to LA, we realized Hollywood is a film and television town more than a dance town and my mom got us in acting classes. And then you start going to school and then people start seeing you on TV shows. I think "The Wonder Years," like I come and you show up after you did "The Wonder Years" and people were like, oh, my God. I saw you in "The Wonder Years" last night. Kind of strange.

I mean, of course you do "Hook" and that changes your life.

- Looky looky, I got hooky.

DANTE BASCO: I mean, as a child actor, it's supremely important to have the support of your parents. You really can't do much if you don't have them, regardless of just them being there and kind of supporting you. Just literally driving you to and from auditions and being there as a guardian for you on the set. And the reality is I love my parents and my dad was a telephone man and my mom was a mother of five. And they didn't have a lot of experience in the Hollywood world. So they kind of gave blind support.

There are things, like my brother Darion, we both auditioned for Rufio the same day. There wasn't really kind of fights over what it was. We do have a saying in the family. "You get what you get and you don't get upset." I mean, we're still up against each other for parts. That's just how it works out.

When I came in 35 years ago to Hollywood, A, there was no Asian roles. B, no one even knew what a Filipino was. And the reality is, the amount of times I've been on a quote unquote, "Asian set" in Hollywood, it hasn't happened. Hollywood is mostly a boy's club, white males mostly, for the history of Hollywood. Again, I don't say it's racist, it's just that's just how it was created, like a lot of things.

But I've been very fortunate in my career to have a really-- I'm very proud of the roles I've done and the career I've been able to carve out for myself in this wild industry. At 15 to the world, I became Rufio. And in a weird way, just on a pop culture way, I've been Rufio in my life longer than I've not been Rufio, which is strange. If you can get one character in your life, something that people are going to care about, in the long run, that's great. And it's a cool character and it's a character I'm still proud of to this day. But at 15 and in 1991 when we're shooting and they put me in a midriff shirt, skin tight jeans, when we're all wrapped and I'm wearing baggy clothes because I'm a hip hop kid, it wasn't that cool to me. I was like God, can I just be cool?

So I mean, when you're young you're just kind of worried about image and how the world is going to see you. I mean, when we were kids, well, I feel like we're a part of a fraternity that not everybody gets to be in. And there's good and bad of the fraternity. But with kid actors, you became quote unquote, "famous" at a certain-- at a young age. And all famous names is like people know you that you don't know. That's it.

But we did it in a very innocent time. We would go to clubs and there was one club that would let us in at underage and there was like teenage clubs. This is the era of Leo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire or Jonathan Brandis. We were all doing our thing. We were on the covers of like "Tiger Beat" and like "Bop Magazine", about, hey, like, something. And it was cool. A little foldout poster of you or something that some girl has on the wall. That's cool. Now, these kids are like literally on the cover of "Vanity Fair" and like people are very interested in who they're dating, at such a young age. And you're like, that's a lot of attention.

It's hard enough to be a teenager. It was hard enough for us back then. Dating each other, getting into fights and trying to-- and again, some of us didn't make it through. I mean, rest in peace, Jonathan Brandis was a buddy of mine and we kind of ran closely in the clip when we were coming up. Jonathan always had a dark side to him, so I understood that about him. He always was dealing with certain things and we all do, like I said. Fame just magnifies whatever issues you may have, mental health wise or depression or things like that.

And then it can also magnify things-- had a lot of friends that were young actors that died of drug overdoses and we lost on the drug scene. It's always a cautionary tale, but I think now with mental health being such a bigger conversation piece, we have the ability to kind of talk about it amongst each other and get a lot more help to whatever that means to you, mental health. And then there comes a time in every young actor's life where they have to-- got to go. You got it you got to go live it for yourself and if you fall, you that's on you, but you're an adult now. You can't be coddles. We can't be college forever. Time for you to go make what you can make out of your career.

- Wow, look at you.

- I don't have a mirror to look at myself, but I suppose I can settle for looking at you.

- I'm having a lot of fun. Again, with Twitch, it's a whole new medium. We are doing the scripted worlds but in a livestream atmosphere, meaning that it's live. My character, I play this character in Xander, who owns a tech company, who came in last season to kind of be a foil to Sebastian, who was the original owner of the original tech company in the original season of "Artificial". The gaming world's very diverse, but the way that even the programmers have created the characters in the world is so diverse, just for the sake of having-- including everybody and not necessarily including our background necessarily, ethnically. We're not going into like storylines or background, but just to see a vast array of society represented in the show, which is really cool.