Ke Huy Quan gave up his Chinese name at 18, and his new memoir explains what he was trying to escape
Ke Huy Quan has spent the last four years being introduced by his full name, deliberately. His memoir, out this week, goes back to the years when he answered to something else entirely — and to the 18-year-old who thought that was the fix.
Ke Huy Quan was 12 when Steven Spielberg cast him opposite Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and 14 when he played Data in The Goonies. By 18, he had decided that both of those facts were working against him.
His memoir Never Say Die arrived on September 15 from Grand Central Publishing, and in an interview with People published Wednesday morning, Quan walked through the chapter almost nobody knew was there: the one where he stops being Ke and becomes Jonathan.
"When those jobs stopped coming, there was this desperation in me that something needed to change," he said. A manager suggested a more American-sounding name, something casting offices could pronounce. Quan signed off on Jonathan Ke Quan — the name that runs across his credits from Encino Man into the 2000s.
The problem was never that nobody knew him
This runs backwards from the usual washed-up-child-star story. Quan was not a kid nobody could place: he writes that casting directors kept telling him in the room that they knew his work, and then kept not hiring him.
"It felt like being pulled backward, like I was still standing in the shadow of my twelve-year-old self," Quan writes.
The obstacle, in other words, was the fame. "My past, it was not a benefit," he told People. The name was the one piece of it he could edit. What followed was decades of stunt choreography and assistant directing instead of acting, until Crazy Rich Asians sent him back to auditions in 2018 — by then, Ke Huy Quan again on the paperwork.
Four things in the book that never made the Oscar speech
- Michael Jackson walked onto the Goonies set. "One day the energy felt different," Quan writes of a soft-voiced visitor who seemed as curious about the kids as they were about him. For a few minutes, he says, Jackson was "an honorary Goonie."
- A well-known actor insulted him at the 2023 SAG Awards. Quan asked for a selfie, pulled one of his open-mouthed silly faces, and got a sharp "Why did you make that stupid face?" — then, per the excerpt, "You're not going to win tonight with that stupid face." He never names him.
- The year in the refugee camp. The family's attempts to get out of Saigon in 1978 and the year under guard in Hong Kong were the hardest pages to write.
- Harrison Ford's rule about memoirs. Asked by Esquire in 2023 whether he would write one, Ford said he didn't want to tell the truth and didn't want to lie. Quan says the line stayed with him.
The SAG story ends the only way it could. Quan won Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role that night, the first Asian performer to take the category.
"I went back to my seat, holding the statue, and smiled to myself. I'd won with that stupid face."
What he wanted the envelope to say
Two weeks later came the Academy Awards, and what he was waiting for had nothing to do with the trophy. Ariana DeBose and Troy Kotsur were reading out supporting actor, and Quan wanted them to say the name an 18-year-old had put away.
"When I was at the Oscars, all I wanted was to hear that name again," he told People. "I wanted the world to hear my Chinese name."
He is 55 now, and what he keeps circling back to is not the comeback. "I'm no longer afraid of failure," he says. "When I was younger, I went to extreme lengths to hide that part of myself."
Earlier we wrote: Julia Stiles brings a Save the Last Dance reunion to DWTS 25 years later
