The intruder of the news gives each evening a spotlight on a personality who could have passed under the radars of the news.
His name sounds almost like a Vietnamese version of Barack Obama’s “Yes we ‘quan'”. A dream for Ke Huy Quan, a former Vietnamese boat people, who won the statuette for best supporting role for Everything Everywhere All at Once, the cardboard of this ceremony of the Oscars and which, inevitably began its thanks by its mother aged 84 years, inevitably in front of her television. Throwing him, in tears: Mom, I won an Oscar!
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Ke Huy Quan is 51 years old. He was born in Saigon, today Ho Chi Minh City in 1971 into a family of eight. He was four years old when the city fell into the hands of the Vietnamese people’s army. His parents, of Chinese origin, were initially forced to flee on their own: the father with Ke Huy Quan and four others in Hong Kong, while the mother and the three others fled to Malaysia. A year later, the whole family was granted political asylum in the United States. 8 years ago. And that too he recalled on Sunday March 12 during the ceremony. “My journey began on a boatsays Ke Huy Quan. I spent a year in a refugee camp. And somehow I ended up here on the biggest stage in Hollywood. They say stories like this only happen in movies. I can’t believe this is happening to me! This is the American dream!”
American box office hits in his youth
The American dream takes shape thanks to an unlikely encounter, four years later. Two “guys”, as he puts it, are desperately looking for an Asian kid to play the part of a pickpocket. They come to do a casting at his school in Chinatown in Los Angeles. The guys in question are called Steven Spielberg and Georges Lucas. His brother tries his luck but the casting director sees Ke Huy Quan who is just behind and says to him: “but you don’t want to try, too?” At the time, he and his mother had no idea who these people were: Indiana JonesStar Warsdo not know !
Obviously, it catches their eye. He is called back the next day. There, his mother forces him to go there in a three-piece suit. He is 12 years old. Steven Spielberg laughs, takes him in his arms and says to him: “Don’t you want to come back tomorrow in jeans and a T-shirt?”
VSis how he finds himself giving the line to Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In French, his character is “Demi Lune”, in English “short Round” (which has nothing to do with it) and which means “a little tour.” Three weeks later, he is on the plane for Sri Lanka where the shooting will last five months. Despite the success of the film, the child star will not be rewarded. Nor for the other success of his youth, the goonies by Richard Donner (always a Spielberg production). We are in 1985, he is 14 years old. Another cult film with 125 million dollars in revenue in the United States. He’s Data in this gang of four teenagers who come across a map! A treasure map drawn by the pirate Willy le Borgne.
A crossing of the desert at the cinema
Despite this rapid start, he is still studying. Polyglot, Ke Huy Quan speaks Cantonese, Vietnamese, Mandarin, English, studied cinema, in California and then in Manchester. And he’s doing well because his acting career is getting complicated. He will find some stunt roles. He learned taekwondo by even doing the fight choreographies in the year 2000, from X Men. Then he goes behind the camera. Not a single cast for 20 years said that Hollywood no longer gave roles to Asians, until this film (little science fiction film) which triumphed at the Oscars. For Ke Huy Quan, this Oscar is actually the 20th award since the release a year ago!