Ke Huy Quan’s True Hollywood Comeback

Inside a greenroom in Anaheim earlier this fall, Ke Huy Quan girded himself for a collision with the past. The 51-year-old actor was in town for Disney’s D23 Expo, where the announcement of his casting in Loki season two would summarily initiate him into the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe. Then someone pulled him aside with the news: Apparently Harrison Ford was standing just outside. As Quan walked over, he could feel his heart pounding. It had been 38 years, after all, since the last time he’d seen his former costar from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

“He had that classic, you know, grumpy Harrison look on his face, and then he raised his hand up and pointed a finger at me,” Quan laughs as he recounts the story. “I swear, I thought he was going to say, ‘Don’t you get near me,’ but instead he said, ‘Are you Short Round?’ And I was immediately transported back to 1984. I said, ‘Yes, Indy, it’s me.’ ”

The photos of the impromptu reunion that Quan posted on Instagram were both a Gen X nostalgia trip and an apt snapshot of this current full-circle moment in Quan’s career, with the success of A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once reigniting a level of fame he hasn’t experienced in decades.

By the time I speak to Quan over Zoom in London in late September, the broad strokes of his comeback have already become companion lore for a film about two Chinese immigrant parents—the rigid Evelyn (played by Michelle Yeoh) and Quan’s ever-buoyant Waymond—who reckon with life’s paths not taken.

Yet Quan still talks in long, excited bursts—at one point the lone Airpod he’s wearing, in a rather Waymond-y fashion, pops out from the force of his enthusiasm. It’s like he’s not sure he’ll get all of this in before the play-off music cues him, like he’s been waiting forever to tell you everything. And when it comes to Ke Huy Quan, there’s always more to the story.

Take that fateful Indiana Jones casting, for example, back when 12-year-old Quan accidentally nabbed the role of Short Round after accompanying his younger brother David to the audition in Los Angeles. Quan, the seventh of nine children and four years into his life in the US, couldn’t resist doing a little older-sibling coaching—and caught the casting director’s eye himself.

He’d spent his early childhood in Saigon, in a big, “very traditional” Chinese household where life was equal parts boisterous and chaotic: “We didn’t need friends, because all my siblings were my friends.” In 1978, his parents split the family up in order to flee Vietnam: His mother took three of the kids, including David—whom Quan describes as “my best friend, to this day”—while Quan and his father’s contingent headed to a makeshift refugee camp in Hong Kong. “I was so young,” he recalls. “I didn’t understand why we gave up the place we called home to get on a boat in the middle of the night with 3,000 people.” The refugees were held on the boat for more than a month before being allowed onshore. In 1979, Quan and his family finally reunited at LAX and moved to Chinatown. He’s called LA home ever since.

I ask Quan if the movies helped with the assimilation process, as they do for many first-gen kids in America, perhaps even sparking that first acting instinct. But he shakes his head. “When we got to the US, we were heavily in debt, so we didn’t have the luxury to go to the movie theaters,” he explains. What Quan does remember is everyone crowding around the 13-inch television at home to watch Hong Kong classics—making Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Chow Yun-Fat his most formative influences. “I don’t think I’d seen a single American movie until I got the role in Indiana Jones,” he muses. “Acting wasn’t even on the horizon, or in my atmosphere.”

After Temple of Doom and 1985’s The Goonies, for which executive producer Steven Spielberg all but set aside the role of Data for Quan, Quan discovered acting as a unique space—sometimes literally via a full-size pirate ship—for play and escapism. He reverently credits the grown-ups he worked with for creating that space: “I was so well protected. I was allowed to be a kid.” He quickly decided acting was his calling. “I thought that the road would be that easy,” Quan says. “But boy, was I wrong.”

At first he thought he just needed to finish high school to be considered for serious full-time work. But Hollywood’s opportunities for Asian actors in the ’80s and ’90s were particularly few and far between, and he wound up spending his early 20s in a perpetual state of envy over how many auditions, much less actual roles, his peers kept landing. There was a two-season spot as Jasper Kwong on Head of the Class in 1990 and 1991, a starring role in the 1993 Taiwanese costume drama The Big Eunuch and the Little Carpenter, and a handful of Asian films, amounting to 10 projects over 16 years. “Everything that I’ve done up until recently, if you look at my résumé, those were all the offers I got,” Quan tells me. The last straw came in 1993, when he found himself competing against a roomful of Asian actors for a no-name two-line part. He called his agent a week later to confirm what the dreaded radio silence already meant. “I remember sitting at the edge of my bed for an hour. I didn’t move. I was just thinking, Wow, what am I doing?” he admits. “I decided that this was not the way to live.”

So Quan quit acting. After graduating from USC’s film school in 1999, he dedicated himself to working behind the camera, often in Asia, often at the industry’s highest levels. He choreographed stunts with Cory Yuen in the early 2000s and worked as an assistant director to Wong Kar-Wai on the Hong Kong auteur’s 2046. No one knew how much Quan missed acting—he was embarrassed even to admit it to himself. “What made it more difficult was the fact that when I’d go out, I’d get recognized,” he explains. “People would come up to me and say, ‘Oh, my God, you’re so iconic!’ or, ‘How come you aren’t acting again? You were so good at it when you were a kid.’ And then I’d go, ‘No, it’s done, I’d rather work behind the camera.’ Those were my go-to answers, and I said it so many times for so many years, I actually believed it.”

His voice trembles as he thinks back to all the hours he’d spent watching 2046 star Tony Leung from behind the camera. “Were there days where I wished that were me, saying the lines? Yeah, definitely,” he says. “Did I fantasize about it? Yeah, but then I crushed it very quickly, before it got ahold of anything, because I knew it wouldn’t happen. It was a dream.”

Quan credits 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians, starring his future costar Michelle Yeoh, as his inspiration to get back in the game. Over email, Yeoh insists the inspiration went the other way. “Ke is too humble—he forgets he was one of the iconic Asian faces in an era where so few Asian faces had broken through to Hollywood,” she writes. “His work paved the way.”

For an entire year, he and his wife, Echo (they met while both were working for Wong), talked over giving in to the “acting bug” once more. “I was going to be 50 years old,” he says. “I didn’t know what it would be like to go and audition and get rejected again and again. I didn’t know whether Hollywood wanted me again.” He made the leap anyway—and the first script he read was for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once. It called for a leading man who could juggle martial arts sequences, Wong-style brooding, and the impossible optimism of a Chinese immigrant father. It was everything Quan could have hoped for: “I was famished for a role like this.”