After his role in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and as Data in the equally iconic The Goonies (1985), Quan managed to pick up some acting gigs as an older teen. However, as he got older, there were fewer roles available—and those that did exist were under-developed, token Asian characters.

“I was in my early twenties and opportunities dried up as an actor,” Quan said during a Nerdist podcast. “I read a lot of scripts and they would often feature Asian characters that didn’t even have a name. Believe me, I have auditioned for many of those roles before and it just wasn’t funny anymore”.

During an Entertainment Weekly interview with his Everything Everywhere All at Once co-stars Yeoh, Curtis and Hsu, and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known as “The Daniels”), Quan went into more detail about his struggles in the industry after his childhood success: “I found myself waiting and waiting for an audition, not even for a job—just an opportunity to audition, and it came once a year or once every six months, while my [caucasian] peers were auditioning twice or three times a week and they were doing movies after movies. It was just really dispiriting, so I decided to step away from acting”.

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Despite the lack of opportunities in front of the camera, Quan was still dedicated to the film industry. “I love movies so much and I didn’t want to give that up”, he said in the same Nerdist podcast. “I enrolled in film school and when I graduated, I got a call from [Hong Kong director] Corey Yuen, who I met many years ago”, and Yuen asked him to help out on a movie he was shooting in Toronto. “I said, ‘sure’. I went there, I walked on set and it was X-Men.” Yuen was the film’s action director. (Fun fact: the fight towards the end of the film between Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique took Yuen’s action team, including Quan, nine weeks to choreograph and rehearse.)

After that, Yuen took Quan under his wing, which led him to work in both Hollywood and Asia. “He taught me a lot about martial arts choreographing and how to shoot an action sequence”, Quan told Nerdist. This eventually led Quan to meeting “one of my favourite filmmakers of all time: Wong Kar Wai.” Quan would go on to work with as Wong’s assistant director on his 2004 film 2046.

In several interviews during the the Everything Everywhere All At Once press junket, Quan revealed that the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians, which also starred Yeoh, was what pushed him to resume his career as an actor.

“That movie hit me on so many levels. I remember watching this three times in the [cinema] and I cried every single time. I had serious Fomo. The entire cast was made up of Asian actors and I go, ‘Wow, I wish I was up there with them’. So that’s where the idea of getting back into acting started.”

“After decades without an agent”, Quan then called a friend who worked as an agent and asked if he would represent him. His friend said yes and “two weeks later I got a call about [Everything Everywhere All at Once]”.

After such a long time away from acting, Quan was understandably nervous about being on camera again. In the Entertainment Weekly interview, Curtis described their first day of shooting together, which was a scene with Yeoh and legendary Asian American actor James Hong, and recalled Quan’s nerves and humility.

“We did our scene and I remember afterwards you leaned over and you went, ‘Was that okay?’”, she said to Quan, “and I was like, ‘Was that okay? That was crazy great!’”

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As Quan is finally being given the chance to do the work he so desperately wanted to do as a young man and receiving his well-deserved recognition for it, many things and people are returning to him. 

Last year, 38 years after the release of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Quan and Ford ran into each other at Disney’s D23 convention, and their photo together broke the internet. In October 2022, he won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor, and posted on Instagram: “In 1985, I was actually nominated for a Saturn award for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. How exciting to finally win one 37 years later”. Including this Golden Globe, he has won close to 30 awards for his work on Everything Everywhere All at Once. 

And in April 2022, Amblin, the film and television production company founded by Steven Spielberg, shared a throwback photo on Instagram of young Quan playing thumb wars with Spielberg on the set of Temple of Doom, and captioned it, “If you think his thumbs are mighty, you should see him wielding a deadly fanny pack (those who know, know)”. It’s safe to assume that Spielberg, who gave Quan his first ever acting role, is proud of the actor for his return to the big screen.

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