S.W.A.T. Star David Lim on How What You Don't Know Can Sometimes Lead to Success

There is a proverb that says: What you don’t know, can’t hurt you. And that has very much turned out to be the case for David Lim, who currently stars as Victor Tan on CBS’ police drama S.W.A.T.Lim came to acting several years after graduating from the University of California San Diego with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, doing a complete 180 and giving up science for the arts.

“I was naïve,” Lim tells Parade.com. “I was very green to the business. I studied engineering, and then I actually got a job as a loan officer for three years before I made the switch and started to pursue acting and modeling. But because I didn’t know anything about the industry, I had to pick it up as I went along. I foolishly, at the time, thought I had a great shot. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I could do this, no problem. I’m going to go take some headshots, I’m going to go find myself an agent, and then I’m going to be on TV.’ So, I think that helped me when I first started.”

Lim struggled for a while after he made the move to Los Angeles, unable to get auditions for jobs that were more than a few lines, but then he got a break with a recurring role on Quantico, and now he is a series regular on S.W.A.T.,  both series that deal with law enforcement.

“I gravitate towards these roles,” he admits. “A lot of the stuff I was auditioning for a few years ago when Quantico came about was law enforcement, military or action, because that’s my look and physicality, and that’s what I gravitated towards, but I love the genre. I grew up watching action movies and spy thrillers and cop shows, cop movies, so I really enjoy it.”

That being said, on tonight’s episode, we will get to see a more personal side of Victor Tan  when his girlfriend Bonnie (Karissa Lee Staples) returns and he is forced to go before an internal review board due to her indiscretion.

“I’m excited to see where it goes, but it’ll be a fun thing to balance a job as a S.W.A.T. officer, where you put your life on the line essentially every day or with every mission, but at the same time, you have a loved one at home, and how do they feel about their future, or the future of your potential family if you’re out here in the line of fire every day?,” Lim continues. “You see it with the Deacon (Jay Harrington) character, because he’s got a family, he’s got four kids. Who knows what’ll happen? So, that’s where it’s heading.”

https://parade.com/607294/paulettecohn/shemar-moore-on-beefing-up-for-s-w-a-t-reboot/

Following is more of our conversation:

Who do you see Victor as?

I see him as the guy who just loves the job. He used to be a vice cop in Hollywood division, and that wasn’t for him. He wanted to get out, it was eating away at him. When you’re in vice, it’s undercover work, it’s graveyard shifts, you’re dealing with gambling and drugs and prostitution, and he didn’t want to be part of that world. So, finally when he made S.W.A.T., it was a job that he really loved, and now that he’s on the team with who he’s on the team with, he just loves his teammates, you know? He’ll have their back through anything. He loves giving it to Street (Alex Russell). As you can see, we’ve got a nice, playful relationship, the two young guys on the scene.

Hotshots.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of the two hotshots. We’re great together, we like to go at it. It’s very similar to our relationship off the screen as well.

Also, he’s had a little bit of a rough past. He lost his father at a very young age, so he was raised by the uncle figure, if you remember from last season, and he’s not as close as he’d like to be with his mother, but we’ll see that a little more as this season progresses.

So, his family really is the S.W.A.T. team. It’s Hondo (Shemar Moore), Deacon, Luca (Kenny Johnson), Street and Chris (Lina Esco), and he just loves being around them. He’s got a nose for action. He’s a good cop. I think we’re going to see him grow this season in a way that we haven’t seen in the first couple of seasons, and we’ll get into a little more of his love life, as well.

Were you there when they did the initial training for this? If so, what was it like?

We went through a bootcamp when we first got the pilot. I was an 11th hour addition to the cast, so when I showed up to Universal Studios, it was probably two days before we started filming the pilot. I was meeting Shemar and the cast for the very first time. He welcomed me in with open arms. I remember walking into this room on the Universal lot and Shemar just giving me a big old hug.

So, from the get-go, I think we all had a really great chemistry, but we were in a small room, and there was tape all over the floor to simulate different rooms and hallways, and we spent a couple of hours learning how to move through a building, and clear rooms, and, hold our guns. We had former S.W.A.T. officers there with us. We did a couple of days of that, just going into the pilot.

When we found out we got picked up to series, we really went to a bootcamp. We spent about three days up in Santa Clarita at a powerplant, six to eight hours a day just training and moving tactically, working with former S.W.A.T. officers, former Navy SEALS, and that’s where we really started to dial it in on how these guys move, and how to look the part.

Then to this day, it’s a constant. We always have our tech advisor on set, and he’s a former San Diego S.W.A.T. officer, Otis Gallop. He also plays Sergeant Stevens in the show. It’s just a constant, we ask him questions, he advises us, we collaborate between him and the director of how we want these action sequences to go, keeping it true and keeping it entertaining, but also keeping it authentic as much as we can to what these guys would do in real life.

Having spent time with real S.W.A.T. members, do you think you could do it if you weren’t an actor?

Oh, my gosh. I’ve thought about that before. It’s one thing to be getting shot at with fake bullets. When we’ve gone out to the gun range and used real ammunition, it’s just a totally different feel and a level of respect that you have to have for these weapons, and that’s just firing at targets that aren’t moving. So, do I think we could maybe understand the movements through a home, if we’re breaching it? Sure, maybe, but realistically, these guys have trained their whole careers, and this is what they do. They live, breathe, and die S.W.A.T., and training, learning how to use the weapons and doing target practice. So, to answer your question, most likely not.

There’s a gym set that we see each week. Do you get to work out while you’re on the set? Is there some kind of competition that goes on?

Some friendly competition here and there. We all take pride in our work and we all want to look the part and feel the part as actors. So, yeah, we do have a gym that travels with us on set, thanks to Shemar. He had it built himself, and it’s amazing. It’s like an Equinox in the back of a semitruck. It’s wonderful because you’re on set for 12, 14 hours a day, so there’s just no time, nor do you want to get in your car afterwards and go to the gym, but we do here and there on our lunch break, or if we have a little bit of down time, we can hop in there and get a quick workout in.

For me, the physicality of the show, it’s such a physical show, the hours are so long, and you’re carrying around heavy gear, that you need to be in good physical shape. Then there’s that aspect of wanting to be in good shape just to do these guys justice, because when you meet these guys, real S.W.A.T. officers, they’re huge. When they’re not on a mission or training for a mission, they’re working out. They’re in the gym, so these guys are big boys and girls.

These days there is so much tension between minority communities and the police, what do you talk about on the set that you hope that S.W.A.T. accomplishes? The show accomplishes, not an actual S.W.A.T. team.

I think there’s only so much you can do in 42 minutes of television, and each of our episodes kind of addresses a separate topic. You have serialized arcing storylines, and character stuff, but in terms of the bad guy that we’re after, it’s just that single, standalone episode. So, can you address a topic and solve it in that amount of time? I don’t think so, but I think you can certainly start a conversation.

We had a really wonderful episode last season about a school shooting, which is just really sensitive material, and, thankfully, we have some really brilliant writers, who I think tackle these subjects in such an honest and thoughtful way, and from different perspectives. I think what that particular episode accomplishes, it just started a conversation and addressed something that’s very current in what’s happening in the world today. The outreach of messages and love that we’ve received from people who have been affected by school shootings, and people who watched that episode, it was really touching.

As an actor and as a show, I think that’s what you’re going for. You want to entertain, you want to have a long run as a show, you want to have fun, but, obviously, you want to, I think, affect people positively and start conversations about stuff that people maybe really don’t want to talk about. I think that’s what our writers and showrunners and myself, as well, want to accomplish at the end of the day.