Ke Huy Quan Is Still Cashing Those Indiana Jones Checks

It’s 1983, and Ke Huy Quan had just immigrated to the United States. “I barely speak English. I was busy being a kid, you know, trying to acclimate into my new life,” he told David Spade and Dana Carvey this week on the Fly on the Wall podcast. “I was living in Chinatown, Los Angeles, at that time. It was just a very small Chinese community. And then one day, a casting director and his associate came to my elementary school.” 

That was a hell of a day. The casting director was trying to find a kid actor for a little independent movie called Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Why didn’t Steven Spielberg hold auditions for child actors? Who knows? But the casting director was looking for kids in a school gymnasium just the same. Kwan was given lines to read, but “I can barely understand any of it. I didn’t even know if Indy was a name or a person or a state. Of course, this was a sequel to one of the biggest movies of all time.”

Was Kwan hyped about the chance to be in a movie? “I knew nothing about it,” he said. “Being an actor was the last thing I ever wanted. I was just busy doing homework and learning English.”  

But after the audition, the family got a call from Spielberg’s office to come in for a sit-down with Steven and George. (Let’s plausibly guess “Lucas.”) One problem: The Kwan family didn’t have a car. Spielberg’s team sent a driver.

The rest is blockbuster history. But there’s something even more amazing than immigrant kid Ke Huy Quan being plucked out of a gymnasium to star in a Spielberg movie. “I didn’t have an agent. I was not a member of the Screen Actors Guild. I didn’t have a lawyer to look after me,” Quan said. “So whatever they gave me, whatever contract agreement they gave me to sign, we just signed it.” 

The salary was generous, which was nice considering Quan didn’t have representation. “But what was even more incredible was that they made me a profit participant.”

That revelation practically knocked the podcast hosts out of their chairs. 

“What???” boggled Spade.

“No!” exclaimed Carvey.

“Without asking, without lawyers protecting me,” Quan assured them. “You never get profit participation unless you really fight for it. And this is why I’m so grateful to them, because knowing that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is gonna be the biggest movie in 1984, and yet they’re still so generous.”

Before the movie, Quan’s parents were heavily in debt, giving up everything they had to get their nine kids to the United States. “That very first check that came in was big enough where our parents didn’t have to rent a tiny home for all of us. I was able to afford to buy a bigger house for all of us to live in. Not only it changed my life, but it changed all of my family’s life.”

Forty years later, that profit participation deal means Quan is still cashing them Indiana Jones checks, all thanks to a million-to-one shot in an elementary school. 

“Years later, the casting director told me that the minute I walked out the door, he called Steven Spielberg and says, ‘We don’t have to look anymore. We found your kid,’” Quan remembered. “And that was pretty amazing.”