How Everything Everywhere All At Once Accidentally Recreated A Scene From Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom
In retrospect, it's no surprise that "Everything Everywhere All At Once" received the breakout mainstream success that it enjoyed earlier this year. Audiences were clearly starved for the kind of high-concept, fantastical, and refreshingly original story that not even big-budget superhero movies could deliver. The added bonus of seeing the legendary Michelle Yeoh fully embody the role of Evelyn in all her varied multiversal forms certainly helped, priming the actor for perhaps her first Oscar nomination ever. But the secret weapon of the film, based on many of the glowing reactions to the latest mind-bending fever dream from directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert ("Swiss Army Man"), would have to be the emotional, hilarious, and action-packed performance of Ke Huy Quan.
Devastatingly enough, Quan's role in "Everything Everywhere All At Once" was his first in decades, largely because of the prevalent racism that drummed the talented actor out of the business altogether. This, of course, followed his promising start as a child actor in 1984's "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" as the beloved sidekick, Short Round. That legacy was never far from anyone's minds during production of the Daniels' latest film, though it ended up manifesting itself in the movie itself in truly unexpected ways. In one of the most hard-hitting scenes late in the story, Quan's Waymond pours out his heart and underlines the film's core message of being kind to one another with a show-stopping, passionate speech that takes full advantage of the actor's emotional range.
According to the Daniels, Quan's casting intersected with his most famous previous role in a serendipitous way — one that called back to another key Quan-centric moment decades before in "Temple of Doom."
'Wait a minute, did we just rewrite the scene from 'Indiana Jones 2'?'
When you need a voice of reason to make a heartfelt plea for an end to fighting in your movie, the answer is clear: Simply cast Ke Huy Quan to deliver those lines. It worked in a pivotal moment of "Everything Everywhere All At Once," but the actor pulled off a similar feat way back during his first career role, too. That eerie similarity didn't escape the notice of the Daniels during filming, as they told The Wrap in a recent interview. According to Daniel Kwan:
"Waymond is sort of the secret heart of the movie. I remember while we were watching the sequence when he is trying to convince Michelle Yeoh to stop fighting and to be kind and he's giving us a really emotional performance. It actually triggered a sense memory in me when I (thought), 'Wait a minute, did we just rewrite the scene from 'Indiana Jones 2' where Short Round is talking to Harrison Ford 'cause (Indiana Jones) has gone evil, at the end of 'Temple of Doom'? He's been, like, voodooed, brainwashed or something. And he says (something like), 'Indy! Indy! Please! Stop, stop fighting.' I was like, 'Whoa, this is bizarre.'"
Scheinert adds that, "While we were shooting, we started to reflect on how the whole movie was becoming this opportunity to show that all these Asian actors have so much more to offer than Hollywood has been giving them." Though this applies to Yeoh and her co-stars James Hong and Harry Shung Jr., it also sums up Quan's ability to return after decades of involuntary retirement and end up stealing every scene in "Everything Everywhere All At Once."
Accidentally evoking "Indiana Jones" along the way only makes it even more special.