Beyond Ke Huy Quan’s emotional tearful speech when he went up to collect his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, Oscar night left more moments to remember that the 51-year-old actor of South Vietnamese origin will never forget.
Quan was surrounded by two of the most important people in his career. Harrison Ford was in charge of awarding the most anticipated statuette of the night, the one for best film of the year, to Everything at once everywhere, and Ke Huy Quan, who played Stopper in the second installment of the Indiana Jones saga She rushed towards him, hugged him and kissed him. It was not for less, because he wanted to share his happiness with the person who was next to him in his first movie role.
That exciting moment was captured by the cameras. But then there was another more private one that did not come out but that the protagonist wanted to share. “During one of the commercial breaks, I ran up to Steven Spielberg and he gave me a big hug,” Quan explained. “He hugged me and said, ‘Ke, you’re an Oscar-winning actor now,’ and hearing him say that meant a lot to me. I still can’t believe it.”
Steven Spielberg went home without any awards. His film The Fabelmans was nominated for seven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director (Steven Spielberg), Original Screenplay (Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner), Score (John Williams), Leading Actress (Michelle Williams), Supporting Actor (Judd Hirsch) and production design (Rick Carter and Karen O’Hara). The defeat did not taste bad at all for the filmmaker, who had already expressed his love for the winning film, directed by the Daniels.
The victory of Ke Huy Quan, whom Spielberg discovered as a Stopper in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984 and which he transformed into the unforgettable Data from The Goonies in 1985, was also a bit of his own.
The director himself has highlighted on occasion that he did not give him the role out of love for art, but because he understood that he was the person he was looking for to play Stopper. Spielberg stressed that, in a casting process, actors are not given roles because they like them, but because they are suitable for what the script needs.
Later, he recalled how Ke Huy Quan took over the role of Stopper. “With Ke, he was Stopper. He was great for the part. When I met him, he took the room by storm. He still does! He has such a positive energy. He just opens his heart, and that’s how he was when I was a kid auditioning for the film. I later realized the responsibility of bringing such a young person into this business, but also my admiration for him for how he has behaved in this industry. After playing Stopper, I cast him in The Goonies to play Data,” he explained in an interview after his friend won the Golden Globe in January. “When he got the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, my heart skipped a beat,” he acknowledged then.
Missing for years, the actor was returning to the screen as the husband of Michelle Yeoh’s character in All at Once Everywhere. In an interview with Fotogramas, the actor explained his departure from the industry when he discovered that there were no interesting roles for “a young Asian”, something that changed when Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu, 2018) was released. “I realized that maybe something was changing in the industry and that for years I have refused to acknowledge an obvious fact: I missed acting,” he confessed to us. “I looked for an agent and, shortly after, I got the script for Everything at the same time everywhere.”
Ke Huy Quan has admitted that if the opportunity arises to return to the Indiana Jones franchise, he would do so without hesitation. His great success has opened many doors for him and we will soon see him in the second season of Loki, as well as in movies like American Born Chinese, where he will once again coincide with Michelle Yeoh, and The Electric State.
