great interview with John Cho

"The Game-Changer: An Interview with John Cho"

It's almost perverse how much I've thought about my Asian American audience, and my whole career, every job -- every audition -- that I've ever been offered, I think about how it will serve the community or not. If people will appreciate it or find it offensive, and it's almost the single factor by which I take jobs or not. Because as soon as I started, I realized it was so important to people. From my experiences as a boy, I realized that those images meant something to me. Mostly, it's not grandiose to where I thought I could affect positive change. I was really just trying to avoid doing damage to the Asian American psyche. I just figured, I don't need to contribute to that.

As excited as I to see John Cho's analysis of Asian-Americans in media and Hollywood, I'm almost sad that he invests so much into the AA community. It's admirable what he does, but it's sad that he has to be aware of so much that a hetero white male actor does not.

[On Harold and Kumar] There was all this racial humor in the movie, and the advertising department wanted to say "Starring the Asian guy in American Pie, and the Indian guy from Van Wilder..." and they did go with that, and they submitted that to me for approval, and I said, "I don't like it." They asked me why, and I explain it to them, and that was tricky because it's difficult explaining to my own representatives, why that didn't jibe with me, because everyone kind of felt like it was keeping in tone with the movie. And I said, "I don't like it. We're poking fun at racism in the movie all the time, but it puts the audience on the wrong side of the racism joke." So they were playing with the wording a little bit in the edits, and they kept coming up with versions to make me happy, but they were essentially the same thing [....] And eventually they went with it, and it's one of those things where I look back and I've very proud of the movie, but that's the thing I remember.

Why it is so difficult to market satire or irony. Some people don't understand that it's poking fun of the Asian stereotypes, instead of pandering to the stereotypes.

My career has been mostly movies that I couldn't see when I was a child, and I think maybe that was part of why I liked Star Trek. It was about pleasing the kid, the young John Cho. And I'd always wanted to do something set in space and it was a childhood fantasy but it was also one of my political goals as an Asian American actor, to do something set in space, because I couldn't do a Western as an Asian American, and the Western was a real cinematic goal for me. So Star Trek was perfect -- the frontier.

Okay, so I love how he's very realistic about never getting that Western (I think Jackie Chan's turn in Shanghai Noon doesn't really work with Cho's film career) but is so happy with the space western.

It's just an intensive, interesting interview with a fascinating person.

APA: Last question...for Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, Viva La Union recorded a song for the soundtrack with the line, "I want my own Chinese baby" -- what's that about?

JC: When I was thinking about it, I thought of a literal baby. There's a kind of lack that children fill, that's just the dark side of being a parent, I think. And there's an accessory quality to Chinese babies in America, and I just think it's funny. I just liked it. And you know, I would know people who would fawn over Asian babies more, and it got me to thinking, there's this belief that Asian babies are really cute, and it got me thinking that our whole race is infantilized to some degree, and it manifests itself in different ways. You infantilize a woman, and she becomes eroticized. You infantilize a man, and he becomes emasculated. You infantilize a baby [laughs] -- and it's possible, it appears that you can infantilize a baby even more. [laughs] The babies need to be cuter than white babies. And it's just a weird thing that I felt like said something about mainstream America's relationship to Asians in general. So that's where it came from.