Ke Hui Quan won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
Kwan took home the Oscar on Sunday for his critically acclaimed role as a doting husband in “Everything Everywhere at Once.”
This distinction makes Quan, who is Chinese Vietnamese, the second actor of Asian descent to ever win in his category. The first Chinese Cambodian refugee Hang W. Angor, who won the award for his role in the 1984 drama “The Killing Fields”. Kwan beat out Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan for “The Banshees of Inishrin”. Brian Tyree Henry for “Causeway” and Judd Hirsch for “The Fablemans”.
The Oscar is the latest in a series of awards that Kwan has been nominated for in the role, in which her character helps save the multiverse while trying to keep her failing marriage and family together. The actor won Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role at the first Screen Actors Guild Awards, becoming the first Asian to win in the category. Prior to this, he won Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, and Gotham Awards.
While “Everything Everywhere” catapulted the actor into the limelight, Kwan has previously been open about his struggles in Hollywood, especially after achieving early success as a child star in the 1980s. His career began with the 1984 blockbuster hit “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” in which he played Indiana Jones’ kid sidekick Short Round. The next year, he found himself in another iconic role as neighborhood bully Data in “The Goonies”. However, opportunities dried up, Kwan said, and he decided to give up his acting career to work behind the camera.
“Hollywood didn’t want me. There weren’t any roles for me, so I spent most of my late teens and early 20s just waiting for the phone to ring, and it rarely did,” Kwan said. said at The Hollywood Reporter’s “actors roundtable” on Tuesday. “The difficult part was to say goodbye to the dream I always wanted, but it was difficult to be an Asian actor at the time.”
Although Kwan became respected behind the scenes as a stunt coordinator and assistant director, working on projects like “X-Men,” he said the blockbuster hit “Crazy Rich Asians” inspired the actor to have a change of heart. .
Kwan said on “Roundtable” that the expanded roles for Asian actors, which rom-coms symbolized, inspired him to get back into the acting game.
“I realized Hollywood has changed dramatically. They’re giving more opportunities to a wider group of people,” Kwan recalled. “I said, ‘Maybe I should try acting again.’
Although Kwan was able to book “Everything Everywhere,” she still had difficulties finding work after production shut down, she said on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” last month. And he feared that he was “experiencing everything that I experienced as a child.” But since the film’s release, Kwan said her career has changed a lot. He will also be featured in the upcoming Disney series “American Born Chinese” as well as the second season of Marvel’s “Loki”.
“Things are very different for me now than they were before. I’m really blessed and I feel very, very grateful,” Kwan said on “The Late Show.” “It’s been such an emotional journey since I came back to acting, I’ve cried a lot, my wife my Too upset to cry.”
