He was required to take a foreign language to graduate from New York University, where he majored in acting. He chose Chinese, partly to be different from his peers, and imagined someday visiting the country.

"It seemed so cool to be the white guy who spoke the weird Asian language, who would go off to a strange foreign land and know how stuff there worked," he says.

Kos-Read arrived in China after graduation in 1997.

For the first two years, his life was similar to beipiao - Chinese who seek their fortunes in the capital.

Kos-Read worked in training schools for businesspeople. But the work was so boring that he sometimes fell asleep in his own classes.

He started a small business, worked for trade companies and even tutored foreign children in math.

"A lot of times, I saw foreigners appear in Chinese movies and TV shows," he recalls.

"I thought I was better than them both in acting and speaking Chinese, but I didn't know how to get to be like those people."

One day, he saw an advertisement in an expatriate magazine seeking a foreign actor for a movie. He went for a screen test and got his first role. Invitations for other parts soon followed.

In the beginning, the roles Kos-Read played were mostly four "unrealistic cliches" - the rich foreigner who falls in love with a Chinese girl and pursues her in vain; the person who makes the script seem more international but really has nothing to do with the actual American experience; bad guys in history; and foreign friends of Chinese characters.

"One of the reasons the foreign characters were not written well in the past is because there were not many foreigners in China," Kos-Read says.

"So, foreigners were just like some strange things from another planet that writers had to guess at."

But much has changed, especially in the past half decade, as China interacts more with the rest of the world.

"So, now there are real people with real stories and real goals instead of just tools for the script to use," Kos-Read says.

The actor explains that he always gives 100 percent to every role, even those that are less than ideal.

Even though his Chinese is fluent, he still asks assistants to go over the script scene by scene with him.

"I need to understand what the character wants in life, and then I will be able to know what he wants in the movie, in every scene and then in every sentence," he says.

"I need to know when he says 'hello', why he says 'hello' and the response he wants from you, because there are a billion different ways to say it."