After reading dozens of interviews with John Cho, I realize not a single one of them doesn’t ask the 46-year-old actor about Asian-American representation—the lack of it, the future of it, how being a handsome Korean American with a lengthy IMDb page puts him at the center of that conversation. After all, he’s #StarringJohnCho, the guy that had his face Photoshopped by fans in place of white actors in the name of representation. But maybe he needs a break from that responsibility. Everyone does. So, going into our interview, I think, Okay, I’m just going to talk to John Cho about his new movie. No Asian stuff this time.
Then, slouched across a gray couch after his GQ photo shoot, the first thing John Cho says to me: “I’ve been thinking about white supremacy a lot.”
So much for that. Instead of talking about Searching, the twisty thriller that takes place entirely across computer and phone screens, the one he’s here to promote, we start talking about the return of Nazis. And eventually we get to Searching, and move onto Asian-American stuff, which Cho speaks about thoughtfully, wading through it like the muddy, messy subject that it is. (It’s obvious he thinks about it a lot.) But first, I have one very pressing question...
GQ: You’re the only Asian not in Crazy Rich Asians. Did you miss the meeting?
John Cho: I don't know what happened.
Have you seen it?
I’ve not seen it. Not yet.
What drew you to Searching?
The script.
What does the script look like, because just I can't even imagine how a movie that takes place on a computer translates?
They called it a scriptment, which it started out as short treatment, and they blew it up into something that would resemble what I usually read. It read like a very traditional thriller, and I mean that as a compliment, because at its core, I wanted to do this kind of movie. I just miss the thriller genre. I feel like it's disappearing.
As a child of the '80s and '90s, I really grew up on those and miss them. So, that excited me. But the concept of shooting on devices was a turn off. Or rather so foreign I didn't know whether I wanted to be involved in it. I had a phone call with Aneesh [Chaganty], the director/writer, and I did say “no.” I just didn't feel like we could get there. Also, I didn't know what the process would be like. It just seemed like we were cruising for a bruising in a lot of ways.
But then he came back at me, and we met, and I was really impressed with him after meeting him in person. He brought all these ideas on his laptop, and was showing me what he planned, and I thought let's take the jump. I liked him so much.
Does that happen often? That you'll say no to something and they'll come back to you?
No!
So what was shooting actually like? So much of the movie is you in front of a screen looking concerned.
Shooting was weird. My favorite stuff was the stuff that was more traditional, like when we were creating all those memories with the daughter. Those were—
The first 10 minutes of the movie?
Yeah, that was acting as I knew it. Then we went into the computer stuff, and that was very strange, because it was very specific. But there was nothing there. Like these tiny movements with your eyeballs would be a plot point.
I guess the camera was pretty close?
It was the distance of a laptop. We used a GoPro, not an actual laptop, but they had a dummy laptop so I could mime typing.
And all the UI and stuff, that was just animated later, probably, right?
Yeah. They had very rough stuff, and [Aneesh] would show me. But it got refined later on and they built it out, so that's why it took so long to edit. Just getting rights from all these photographs, and then building out every Facebook profile, and every Google search, all those drop-downs.
The animations feel very authentic. Just little small clicks and things like that feel just like your computer.
I realized we couldn't have shot this 10 years ago, because we didn't have a collective nostalgia for devices yet. But now we're at this point where we do, and those sounds have meaning for us. Not only are we living inside these things more and more, but we also are on the sixth and seventh generations of stuff so that we have memories that are inside the devices. We have a present tense that's happening inside the devices, and we also have fondness for the hardware, which is weird. Like clicks that the Windows keyboard makes versus the Mac keyboard, all those sounds mean something, and blue text or green text mean something. All those connote things that had not been expressed in cinema, and I didn't know that could be expressed in cinema.
Was the family always supposed to be Korean?
Yes. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do it. Aneesh is from San Jose. The movie is a valentine to his family. That was one of the payoffs of the movie for me, as well. There is a whole Asian-American family, and no one is running away from their culture. They love one another. The family looked a lot like mine, especially the dad, and so it was unexpectedly meaningful to me.
Yeah, I think it's like they're represented without trying to say anything other than here they are on the screen.
Right, and it's ironic, because it's not saying anything about it, but not saying anything about it is saying a lot about it, you know?
Does it feel weird to you that you’ve become the symbol of Asian-American representation?
I try to burn as few calories thinking about that as possible because I don’t want to lose sight of the fun. If I do, then I think the work suffers. If you start thinking about representation too much—and you think about what movie should exist for an Asian-American person, and for an Asian-American male, or what you would like to see an Asian-American male doing on TV or in movies, even though that’s a legitimate thing to think about—it clouds my ability to go, “Oh, that’s just a fun thing. I’d like to throw myself into that situation.”
I make decisions based on much dumber stuff. Like if someone offered me a movie where I could punch someone on a moving train, maybe I would consent to being called a chink in that movie, because I would like to do that so much.
Really? You want to be in, like, a Marvel movie?
I was thinking more of a Western.
[laughs] Once I did a comedy pilot because I wanted to wear a hat. I was a spy and wore a double-breasted pinstripe suit and a hat. I was like, “I’m in! Hat!” [points to head]
So what kinds of projects are interesting to you now? Like I don't want to draw too broad a line, because it's just two data points, but I feel like Columbus and Searching are two smaller, high-concept movies.
I don't know. I'm still fumbling my way in the dark I feel like with my career, if you can call it that. It doesn't feel like a career. It just feels like something comes along and I'm excited, but I can say that I am trying to obey my gut reaction to things, be it in script or the people that are making it. Sometimes the agents will say, "It's really smart to do this" or "This is an up and coming so-and-so." I don't think people were stoked that I was doing Searching.
Really?
Yeah, no. No one was making any money. But I said yes. I think it'll be alright if I just keep doing more of that. I may not make any money is the issue, but…
There will always be another Star Trek.
Then with Aneesh, it was like, This guy may do something different, and that is unusual. We could fuck this up, and it could be stupid. My saving grace was if it was truly horrible, maybe nobody would see it. But I had a feeling about this guy. I believed in him, and I thought maybe he could do it, and so that was an internal thing.
Anyway, which is a way to say I don't know what I'm doing. I know what I'm feeling, but I don't know what I'm doing. [laughs]
I was doing my research and reading old interviews with you, and it made me wonder: Has there been an interview where someone didn’t ask John Cho about Asian-American representation?
Yeah. It's a thing. I mean, I've been trying for years to figure out what I'm supposed to say. Because people throw vague questions at me like, “Do you feel good about the state of Asian Americans in Hollywood?” I'm like, um…
Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.
It makes me wonder what they want from me. It might mean, “Please tell me it’s getting better.” Or it might mean, “Can we stop talking about this shit now, now that it’s better?” It depends on who’s asking, but I try not to answer that question, one because it’s hard to say, and two, I don't know if I'm going to give the right answer. Because when people want a certain answer, you can lose. Sometimes when people ask a question that they're open to the answer, but if they're really requesting an answer, then you're in the shit house already.
I think there's also somewhere in the middle where people just want to know partly that you're thinking about it and how you're thinking about it. Not that there are solutions to these things, but all of the really bad quotes are just people who clearly are not thinking about it, so they give a really dumb answer because they don't care, or it seems like they don't care.
It’s easy to be rah-rah about it, and I’m as rah-rah as anybody. There’s so much more talent that are doing well than there used to be. It’s really, to me, the quality of the writing and broadening of expression, but I feel like that even five years ago, even though there was visibility, I didn’t feel like a substantive change was happening. Now I feel like there’s more writing that may move the needle.
So has there been an interview where no one's asked you about representation?
Probably not.
I guess I failed, too.
Yeah. It's project specific, but maybe this is a compliment to myself. There's always a reason to ask it. Maybe it's because there's something new happening. Or maybe it’s by virtue of my face.
This interview has been edited and condensed.