The actor in 'Everything at once everywhere' has made good bets and has won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor after years of oblivion
Hollywood is a shredder. A machine that rises at the same speed that it expels. An industry where you're a star one day and an outcast the next. It has always happened, and it happens with special cruelty with child performers, who become fashionable and star in four successes in a row before being devoured by fame or condemned to ostracism. The examples are several. There is Macaulay Culkin, who went from being America's favorite child to the object of comments and criticism.
Six years before Home Alone came out, Hollywood had another kid. This time it was different because it was about a boy of Vietnamese origin who everyone called by his name in fiction, Plug. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom featured Ke Huy Quan, then known as Jonathan Huy Quan, in a nod to Anglo-Saxon culture and to make it easier to hire him on any product. Steven Spielberg discovered a cheeky, charismatic, and fresh kid who a year later was confirmed as the kid of the moment thanks to The Goonies, a cult title that was produced, precisely, by Steven Spielberg.
After those two successes, he disappeared from Hollywood. There were no more roles for a child of Asian origin. The industry exalted him and spat him out. Since 1986 he only appeared in completely testimonial roles, and since 2002 he was directed without appearing in any film. But the Daniels arrived and everything changed. It was the success of Crazy rich asians that made him try again and he went to a casting for which, a priori, he fit perfectly. It was a role for the new Daniels craze. It was called All at Once Everywhere, and back then it was just a surreal comedy about multiverses from two up-and-coming directors.
Huy Quan seized this new opportunity without thinking that he was facing a fashionable phenomenon in Hollywood and a role that would give him his first Oscar. It has been the favorite for months and has left almost no awards along the way and has been confirmed with the Academy Award that has been received from the hands of last year's winners, Troy Kotsur and Ariana DeBose, who was excited only by saying his name. The actor received a huge ovation. With the audience on their feet and through tears he remembered his mother: "Mom, I've won an Oscar." “My life began on a ship, I was in a refugee camp. Stories like mine only happen in movies, I didn't think this would happen to me. This is the American dream,” he added.
The actor has spent more than three decades thinking that he had no place, and he recognized this in his emotional speech at the Golden Globes, a moment that quickly went viral. “I was raised to never forget where I came from and to always remember who gave me my first opportunity. I'm very happy to see Steven Spielberg here tonight. Steve, thank you! When I started my career as a child actor I felt very lucky to have been cast. As I got older, I began to wonder if that was it, if it was just luck. For years I was afraid that I had nothing more to offer. No matter what I did, I would never surpass what I achieved as a child, ”he would say through tears.
“Luckily, more than 30 years later, two guys thought of me. They remembered that child and gave me a chance to try again. Everything that has happened since then has been incredible. Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, thank you very much. You have given me more than I could have expected ”, he finished by saying in a speech that he also helped in a race for the Oscar where it is not only worth delivering a great performance but also building the best story for the award.
Ke Huy Quan's story is one of those that Hollywood loves. A story of redemption with which they wash their hands and remove the guilt. They were the ones who pushed him aside, the ones who stopped calling him and giving him papers. The same ones that more than 30 years later recognize everything with an Oscar for his showcase. It is also the prize for an actor who makes them face one of the parts of recent US history that most embarrass them, the Vietnam War. Huy Quan was born in Saigon, and after the fall of the city in the war with the US, his parents tried to flee the country twice without success.
To have more opportunities, their parents divided their children and fled separately. His mother took three siblings and went to Malaysia, while his father took five, including him, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Hong Kong, where they spent a year before being granted political asylum in the USA. In 1979 he was able to meet with his brothers and his mother. A 'bigger than life' story is typical of a Hollywood film that also recognizes with this award an entire generation of actors of Asian origin condemned to be funny supporting roles but never with the gap they deserved in the industry.
