![]() “He has this ability to just make you want to watch him and make you want to love him,” Kwan says. The Daniels, for their part, are proud of their role in rediscovering Quan. I look over to the Daniels, and I think it was one of the happiest moments of the shoot because we got it in two takes.” Ke Huy Quan in "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once" (A24) “I saw the fanny pack – shoots up and flies towards the camera, just the way it’s meant to be. “The last part, which is the most difficult part, I kick the strap, and in that instant, it was just like slow motion,” he says. His first few swings with the fanny pack went off without a hitch. He had to pull it off relatively quickly and make it look cool. Quan remembers the scene carried a lot of pressure. “And then I hired a body movement coach because it was really important to me that the audience can distinguish which version of Waymond they’re watching, just based on how he sits, how he walks, how he moves and how he talks.”Īmong his biggest challenges? A martial arts sequence that involves the quintessential ‘80s accessory: the fanny pack. “I hired an acting coach, a dialogue coach, a voice coach, because I wanted them to sound different,” he said. He had not acted in over 20 years, so he embraced the challenge of playing several different versions of the same character. “Never in a million years, in my wildest imagination, did I ever think I would land this role,” Quan says. He realized Quan might be just the right age for the role and asked the casting director to bring Quan in for an audition. “I wondered, ‘Where is that person now? Where is that person who was so formative to my childhood?’ ” “My brain just kind of lit up,” Kwan says. Scheinert’s partner, Kwan, stumbled on the answer when he was scrolling on Twitter and came across a gif of Quan as Short Round. “But then also he had to speak English, Mandarin Cantonese, know martial arts, and be able to switch between multiple versions of himself and be a totally convincing alpha man as well.” “We needed someone who was convincingly sweet, kind of beta male, who you’d almost laugh at and dismiss,” Scheinert says. But they were having trouble finding someone who met all the requirements. Scheinert and Kwan were searching for an actor to play Waymond, Yeoh’s husband – who, like Yeoh’s character, would have several different incarnations in the film’s multiple universes. Ke Huy Quan (right) in "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once" (A24) The film stars Michelle Yeoh as a Chinese-American laundromat owner, whose quest to straighten out her taxes keeps getting interrupted by calls to save not just one universe but multiple. In a stroke of good luck, that was the same moment when the writing-directing team of Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan - self-styled “The Daniels” - were putting together “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” He wanted to be up there with fellow Asian actors, he realized. I also cried because I missed being up on the screen.” “Not only because it was a really moving story. “I remember watching it three times in the theater, and I cried three times,” he says. But for Quan, watching the film and its all-Asian cast brought up very different feelings. Then in 2018, years after his last film role, Quan saw “Crazy Rich Asians.” The movie features a Chinese-American professor meeting her boyfriend’s family in China for the first time – and it is a comedy. As a second degree black belt in Taekwondo, he found work as an assistant fight choreographer and assistant director on both Hollywood and Hong Kong films. “A lot of times it didn’t even have a character name,” Quan says. The phone would ring with auditions for characters who were just stereotypes, he said. I found myself spending a lot of time waiting for that phone to ring.” “It was just really difficult being an Asian actor working in Hollywood at that time. “As I got older, in my late teens and early twenties, there was nothing there for me,” he recalled. This time, he played gadget-loving Data in “The Goonies.” ![]() In 1985, at age 14, he scored another big role. ![]() ![]() “The only thing I didn’t like was every time I was having fun on set, I would get pulled back into a trailer to continue my schoolwork.” Quan had nabbed the role of Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” The next day, his family got a call from Steven Spielberg’s office. “And the casting director saw me and says, ‘Hey Ke, do you want to give it a try?’ ” “I was giving him instructions behind the camera,” Quan says. In 1983, his brother went to a casting call for an Asian kid to star as Harrison Ford’s sidekick in the next Indiana Jones film. ![]()
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