Remember Ensign Hoshi Sato, the bright-eyed communications officer on Star Trek: Enterprise? The one who could decipher alien languages faster than your PADD could ping a warp drive? Well, brace yourself for a temporal warp: that intrepid explorer is all grown up, and at 44, Linda Park, the actress who brought Hoshi to life, is more radiant and accomplished than ever.
While Linda was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1978, her parents would immigrate to America while she was still very young, eventually settling in San Jose, California where Linda Park would grow up and attend school. Throughout her teens and into college she would study theater and dance, devoting herself to both mediums and earning a degree on the opposite coast at Boston University.
A Jurassic Entrance
It wouldn’t take long after she graduated to catch fire in the acting scene, quickly securing a small part in the blockbuster Jurassic Park III as one of Ellie’s research assistants. While she wouldn’t get a chance to fight any velociraptors or William H. Macy, she would get a major Hollywood credit before leaping into a main cast role in the newest entry of the Star Trek franchise, Enterprise in 2001.
Enterprise would see Linda Park play the human ensign and communications officer of the Enterprise, Hoshi Sato. Her character would take a few cues from her real-life self, speaking multiple languages and being a gifted translator much like herself. She would end up acting as Hoshi Sato for all six seasons of Enterprise, appearing in all but one of the series’ 98 episodes.
Trek Time
Star Trek would take up a majority of her time, leading to limited other roles during the next four years of the show. Still, she would try to pick up film roles in between Enterprise filming. Linda would only have a small part in Spectres, probably for the best as the movie was critically panned and considered a box office failure. Linda would still have Trek to fall back on for another year though.
Even with the end of Enterprise in 2005, Linda kept busy with other roles. Making the brief jump to film with feature Honor didn’t turn out quite as well as she had hoped, but she would go on to main cast roles in series like Raines alongside Jeff Goldblum and the shortlived series Women’s Murder Club. She would try to establish a comeback with the series Crash in 2009, based on the Oscar-bait film from a few years earlier.
After the failure of Crash Linda Park disappeared from the spotlight more than usual, instead only taking guest roles in shows like NCIS and Law & Order, fulfilling her Hollywood pact as an actor in the 2000s. Although she wouldn’t land any main television roles, she would have a couple of decent movie hits in the meantime as well as meet her husband Daniel Bess, who she would marry in 2014.
A Short Break
Her career would stall in television and film briefly as she would step more towards the stage than the screen, taking part in plenty of well-known stage productions on and off Broadway during the mi-2010s. Her life would change starting in 2017, with Linda Park being added as a main cast member to Amazon’s hit crime thriller Bosch as the character Jun Park.
She would end up playing that same role through the series’ remaining seasons until it ended in 2021, taking on even greater adventures outside the show. She and Bess would welcome their first child in 2018, with the actress appearing in multiple guest spots around the same time for medical dramas like The Resident and iZombie.
The turn of the decade seemed to bring Linda Park even more fortune, with her role on Bosch finishing up amidst a two-episode guest spot on Grey’s Anatomy and a role in the second season of AppleTV+’s For All Man Kind, a fantastic alternate history sci-fi about the race to the moon extending beyond the sixties and into today.
Where is Linda Park today?
The guest roles didn’t stop either, and Linda would pop up in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Dahmer as well as the television film Black Girl Missing this year. While the only thing on her schedule is a new comedy Dangerous Moms, where she will be playing just one of the said moms, she is known to take her roles selectively to balance time between her career, interests, and family.
Today Linda still resides in the California area and still practices ballet almost religiously. Although she stays busy raising her young child along with her husband Daniel, she still makes time for the fans that helped her achieve her career. Linda regularly appears at Trek conventions across the country, partaking in multiple panels and signings at various events.
