Ke Huy Quan: His Long History with Action Movies
Ke Huy Quan has a friendly face. The entire marketing campaign of his new action film seems built around the fact that he looks like an amiable guy you wouldn’t expect to kick much ass. Even his big comeback role a couple years ago in Everything Everywhere All at Once seemed built around playing with what audiences expect when they first see him. As the goofy wet blanket husband to Michelle Yeoh’s laundry shop owner, Quan first appears with glasses and a fanny pack, seemingly not being much help to Evelyn’s stressful life beyond putting googly eyes around the laundromat. And then, when the multiverse plot kicks in and his body is temporarily taken over by alternate universe versions of his character, he rips the fanny pack and swings it around like a rope dart.
The scene never fails to elicit gasps from audiences, but also laughs - partly because you wouldn’t expect Waymond to be an expert martial artist, but also because it’s not the first thing you think of when you look at Ke Huy Quan. The trailers for Love Hurts, a new starring vehicle for him from the producers of John Wick and Nobody, all start with his smiling face and sunny demeanor selling homes before his past life catches up with him. And yet, Quan has a long history with action cinema, much stronger than audiences who only know him as Short Round, Data, and Waymond might expect.
As a child, Quan fell into the role of a lifetime almost by accident. He tagged along with his brother David in Los Angeles as Steven Spielberg auditioned hundreds of Chinese children for the role of Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and as Quan tells it, he was coaching David through the audition process so much that the producers suggested Ke himself audition for the role. Within three weeks, he and his mother were on a plane to Sri Lanka to shoot the highly-anticipated follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
While on the set of Temple of Doom, Quan found himself taught by a taekwondo instructor certain martial arts moves he would need to do execute in the big climax of the film. Having grown up on Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung pictures (two stars Quan always cites as being a huge influence), he leapt at the opportunity to learn more taekwondo and worked on it back in the U.S., practicing until he reached the level of black belt, second degree.
His next big role, Data in The Goonies, wouldn’t require any of his newfound skills, though, and as he continued to work in Hollywood for the next five years as a child star - a role on a sitcom here, a bit part in Encino Man there - but as he grew, roles began to dry up. And despite a love for action films and acting, the only times he got to combine his two talents were in a direct-to-video U.S./Taiwanese film called Breathing Fire (1991) and a Hong Kong/Taiwan production from 1997 called Red Pirate that he starred in when he lived overseas for a brief period.
After moving back to the U.S. and finding even less work than he did overseas, he decided to enroll in film school at USC to learn as much about film production as possible and hopefully work behind the scenes. After graduation, he was in contact with an old family friend who asked him if he had any jobs lined up for the near future. When Quan told him his future was wide open, this friend said to join him up in Toronto to work on a film shoot where he was hired as Fight Choreographer. That friend was famous Hong Kong filmmaker Corey Yuen, and the film Quan worked on was X-Men (2000).
Ke Huy Quan working behind-the-scenes on X-Men
Corey Yuen was in high Hollywood demand after he lent his choreography skills to Lethal Weapon 4, and would go on to choreograph fight scenes for a number of 2000s American action films such as Romeo Must Die, the Transporter series, and The Expendables. During X-Men, Yuen had Quan work as an Assistant Fight Choreographer and Stunt Rigger, particularly for the final fight scene where Quan got to show Hugh Jackman how to properly execute the final fight scene. He and Yuen worked so well together that Yuen brought him back as an assistant choreographer for the 2001 Jet Li vehicle The One.
From there, Quan worked behind the scenes for many years, particularly in the field of stuntwork and fight choreography in both American and Hong Kong productions, where his work would often go uncredited. He also gained another, much more different Hong Kong connection during this time when he worked with acclaimed art-house auteur Wong Kar-Wai for several years. During this period, he got to work as the First Assistant Director on his film 2046 (his follow-up to the massively successful In the Mood for Love), and started in development with him on a few more projects before he returned to the U.S.
When he decided to dip his feet into the acting pool again, Quan didn’t necessarily have “action star” at the front of his mind, but luckily, when he received the script for Everything Everywhere All at Once, he found a project that allowed him to access so many different parts of his skillset: He got to play the amiable everyman who greets each day with a smile, the romantic lead straight out of a Wong Kar-wai film, and even finally achieve his goals of performing some serious martial arts in a big film.
That performance (and the Academy Award that followed) put him back on the map in Hollywood and he’s been popping up in a number of films since then. Love Hurts, however, is the first real starring vehicle for him since the success of EEAAO, and the film has plastered Quan’s face on billboards and cinemas all over the country. Even more importantly, he finally got to star in a film where he performed his own fight scenes and kick ass, just like his heroes Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung.