The second season finale for Quantum Leap aired earlier this week and Dorkaholics was invited to speak with series lead Raymond Lee prior.
We broke the ice by asking Ray what made him a dork growing up, and he was an open book as he shared about his childhood.
“I was a video game dork; I was a sports dork. I was also raised as a latchkey kid, so I was raised by the television,” Ray said. “So as far back as I can remember, my babysitter was just a TV so the moment I’d get home from school, I would just turn it on and watch everything there was until I fell asleep.”
Ray shows that dorks can be into sports as well.
“And then the weekends were just all tv too, but once sports entered my life, I just became a baseball dork, I played a ton of baseball,” he explains. “And then I became a taekwondo dork and basically between tv and sports that just kind of ran my life.”
As he mentioned his experiences as a latchkey kid, it was easy to draw a similarity to his character Ben Song who was raised by a single mother before the series’ start. Ray responded with such an incredible vulnerability and honesty to his past, which is reflected in the amazing individual he gets to portray on screen.
“There’s a lot of similarities there too, in the upbringing of Ben because I’m an only child raised by a single parent mom. Ben is also the same, the only difference is my father is still alive and out there somewhere, but Ben’s father is dead. But being raised in that way with having the pressure of living up to being an only child and having to have a specific relationship with your mom, I can understand that the level of heightened awareness that you need to have as a kid, as an eight-year-old is not the same as any other eight-year-old who had to be sort of oblivious. And I feel like I’ve always been on high alert, and I think one of Ben’s great strengths is his ability to be on high alert and be okay at surviving at that level too.”
Catch the rest of our interview with Raymond Lee here:
