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Reunited and it feels so good! Hawaii Five-0 alums Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park reunited in Canada on Wednesday, August 2, only weeks after exiting the CBS drama amid contract disputes.
In a pic posted to Kim’s Instagram account, the duo were all smiles as they posed along the harbor in Vancouver, Canada.
“#Cousins #reunited.? Until next time, #Vancouver! ??” the Lost star, 48, captioned the sweet snap.
Park and Kim — who portrayed Kono Kalakau and Chin Ho Kelly, respectively — have appeared on the show since its 2010 debut. Last month, the actors announced that they would not be returning to the series for its eighth season after they were unable to come to an agreement over pay.
According to Variety, Kim, 48, and Park, 43, were seeking equal pay to costars Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan.
The Spider-Man actor announced his exit on his Facebook page on July 5. “By now many of you have heard the news, and I’m sad to say it is true. I will not be returning to Hawaii Five-0 when production starts next week,” he wrote. “Though I made myself available to come back, CBS and I weren’t able to agree to terms on a new contract, so I made the difficult choice not to continue.”
Kim continued: “As an Asian American actor, I know first-hand how difficult it is to find opportunities at all, let alone play a well developed, three dimensional character like Chin Ho. I will miss him sincerely. What made him even more special is that he was a representative of a place my family and I so dearly love. It has been nothing short of an honor to be able to showcase the beauty and people of Hawaii every week, and I couldn’t be prouder to call these islands home. To my local community, mahalo nui loa.”
CBS addressed the stars’ departures on the same day. “We did not want to lose them and tried very hard to keep them with offers for large and significant salary increases. While we could not reach an agreement, we part ways with tremendous respect for their talents on screen, as well as their roles as ambassadors for the show off screen, and with hopes to work with them again in the near future,” the network said in a statement.
CBS chief Kelly Kahl added: “We loved both those actors and did not want to lose them. We made very, very strong attempts to keep them and offered them a lot of money to stick around. We wanted them to stick around. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of having a long successful show is sometimes you lose cast members. We didn’t want it to happen. We tried our darnedest to keep them … we never like to lose characters that the audience loves off long-running shows. It’s the nature of the business. We made very lucrative offers to those actors.”
