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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