Some revenges are more savoury than others. That of actor Ke Huy Quan, Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor - it was his first nomination - at the age of 51, surpasses all others at this incredible 95th ceremony. For there were many thwarted destinies in Hollywood who finally received recognition during the evening. Like Brendan Fraser, a former leading man who was blacklisted following health problems and a sexual assault, who won the Best Actor statuette for his performance as a hyper-obese man in "The Whale".
He too was nominated for the first time, as were two of the actresses in the feature film that won the evening's seven statuettes, including Best Film, "Everything Everywhere All At Once": Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis. The former, at the age of 60, walked away with the Oscar for Best Actress, after a long and magnificent career previously ignored by the Academy. At 64, the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh won the Best Supporting Actress award, again thanks to this crazy film.
But the man who has followed the most tortuous path in life - both personally and professionally - is Ke Huy Quan. As he tearfully recalled on stage at the Oscars: "My journey began on a boat". Born in Saigon in 1971, the young Vietnamese fled his country in precarious conditions with his parents and other "boat people" when he was just 4 years old. Taking refuge in the United States with his family, he was spotted by Steven Spielberg in California, where he was attending school, when he was just 12. The filmmaker gave him the role, adored by the public, of Half Moon, opposite Harrison Ford in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", the huge success of 1984 that launched the now young actor.
"Mummy, I've won an Oscar!
The following year, he followed this up with another Spielberg production: "The Goonies". A few series followed... and that was about it. In the space of 36 years, Quan would only appear in five feature films, in minor roles, and three TV projects. Hollywood has forgotten him. But he wasn't about to give up film for all that. Armed with degrees in languages and cinema, he is also a specialist in taekwondo, a martial art to which he was introduced on the set of Indiana Jones. So, to earn a living, he became a behind-the-scenes actor, more precisely a stuntman and a stand-in, setting the highly choreographed scenes in action films thanks to his mastery of taekwondo on features such as "X-Men".
So he was almost surprised when the "Daniels", aka Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the directors of "Everything Everywhere All At Once", asked him to play Michelle Yeoh's husband in the film. But they, who are such film buffs and pop culture aficionados, hadn't forgotten Half Moon. And they know that his martial arts skills will serve him well in the film's many action sequences. Since then, he and his new film 'family' have been living a daydream. In the space of a few months in 2022, the feature film that audiences have dubbed "EEAAO" has become the phenomenon that everyone in America is talking about. This has brought the team of Hollywood veterans even closer together, and two young filmmakers have been able to call on them.
It's easy to understand the emotion that gripped each of them in turn on the Oscar stage. Ke Huy Quan in particular. The boat-people child, who shouted "Mummy, I've won an Oscar", saw "EEAAO" announced as the winner of Best Film by Harrison Ford, the one-night winner, and Steven Spielberg, the unfortunate contender, was in the audience to witness Half Moon's belated triumph... A story that would make a fantastic screenplay, and one that Spielberg may already be thinking about...
Text by Le Parisien
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