Perhaps John Cho was always destined to be a DILF.

The guy who costarred with Kal Penn in the canonical stoner Harold & Kumar comedies; who helped normalize queer Asian relationships through his role as Sulu in the recent Star Trek movies; who gave audiences a glimpse of a regular, suburban Korean American family in Searching; and who infiltrated the traditionally white raunchy teen-flick market by teaching the world the acronym “MILF”—Mom I’d Like to Fuck—in American Pie, is now playing a boring-but-attractive single dad in Don’t Make Me Go, a Y.A. drama that premieres July 15 on Prime Video.

The movie, directed by Hannah Marks and costarring Mia Isaac as Cho’s daughter, Wally, is a melodrama about a father who learns he has terminal cancer. He forces his kid to go on a road trip, a covert op to track down the mother who abandoned them. Cho’s character, Max Park, wasn’t written specifically for an Asian or Asian American actor; Marks recently told The Hollywood Reporter that “originally, the characters were Caucasian…but I was such a John Cho fan that it just felt like, let’s change it.”

Telling Cho that he’s gone full DILF elicits an actual spit take. Our conversation is even more apropos because it happens the same day that former MILF-in-question Jennifer Coolidge was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work in HBO’s The White Lotus. (Fun fact: A version of the portrait of Coolidge that Cho kisses in American Pie now hangs in his garage—confusing his 14- and 9-year-old kids, because he jokes that they won’t be seeing that movie for another 40 years.)

“What I found refreshing about it was that they weren’t thinking about themselves as Asian,” he says of Don’t Make Me Go, after he recovers. “The world sees what it sees, but the story stays with those two. And they don’t talk about that. And I don’t talk about that in my house very much with my wife and my kids. So that seemed real.”

Indeed, it seems Cho has come full circle. He’s not playing a part because he’s Asian; he’s playing one that doesn’t require him to be Asian. He just needs to be a hot dad who can maybe sing karaoke. That’s the opposite of his experiences working on another road trip movie, 2004’s Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. There, Cho says, writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg “padded the script” with specific details about his and Penn’s roles because they “were afraid that the studio would change the ethnicity of the characters.”

“We didn’t end up shooting some of it, but the original script had more cultural conversations about their growing up,” Cho recalls. “It had to be rooted in that as a defense mechanism so that they wouldn’t get turned white.”

A few years ago, a Vanity Fair video interview with Hasan Minhaj went viral because Minhaj said he thought he was more attractive than the white actor Dax Shepard. The issue, Minhaj said, is that there are more parts available to someone who looks like Shepard.

Cho hadn’t seen the video when we talked, but he understands Minhaj’s sentiments. Cho’s shock of black hair, which was looking extra fluffy and tousled on the day of our call, has been its own trending topic online, and people definitely noticed when he got ripped to play Spike Spiegel in Netflix’s live-action take on the Cowboy Bebop anime series. Others know him by the distinctive mole on his forehead that’s just off center. (When he was a kid, he learned about the mark of Cain; he thought it was cool that he had one too, making him “one of the bad people.”)

At the moment, Cho does have an air of danger about him. But that’s mostly thanks to the mustache-goatee combo he grew for the second season of Apple TV+’s murder-mystery comedy, The Afterparty—a look he says his family doesn’t support, because it’s like “they're living with a villain.” (This, Cho stresses, doesn’t necessarily mean that he is the series’ new killer.)

“Sometimes when I work with a younger Asian actor, it’s difficult for them to even comprehend…that the majority of the parts that were available to Asian actors existed to make fun of Asians or to denigrate them,” he says. “Absolutely, we’ve made progress from there. But Hasan’s observation, I would agree with. It still exists—that standard for what an Asian has to look like, particularly for men.”

It’s a poisonous problem for young actors. “It took me longer to develop acting skills,” says Cho, “because you spend a lot more time with inferior words.” Beginners are often stuck with one-line, glorified extra parts, “you know, ‘there you go, sir’; ‘soup or salad?’ I spent many years in the ‘soup or salad?’ phase. You don’t grow. I’ve always thought if I could get my hands on some good words, maybe I’ll get good as an actor.”

That said, Cho is amazed at how poised today’s young actors are, remarking how well Isaac handled herself during press junkets for Don’t Make Me Go. Even their comfort onscreen is impressive. “It took me many years to look at the person I was supposed to look at—the flesh and blood person—and to just say my lines,” he says. “My whole career has been trying not to pee my pants and to relax.”

It’s a jarring confession, since Cho radiates confidence and charisma onscreen. For years, he was one of just a few American actors of East Asian descent who was a household name—so ubiquitous that, in 2016, it was his name writer and creative strategist William Yu chose when he created a social movement geared toward pointing out Hollywood’s history of whitewashing and other issues. The hashtag #StarringJohnCho, accompanied by the actor’s face photoshopped over movie posters and stills, became an anthem.

Six years later, inequality is still very much a problem in Hollywood—and it’s also, indirectly, highlighted an issue in my profession. As Cho’s fame changed, so too did the kind of outlets that were covering him, and the diversity of the people who were writing about him for those outlets: Many of those who have profiled the actor in mainstream media in recent years have also been of Asian descent.

“I have found myself speaking about issues of race—often against my will—it seems like for all my career,” Cho laughs. He adds that he doesn’t have a preference as to who interviews him, but that “I think it’s been fruitful to have conversations with Asian journalists about it too. I think I’ve been learning from the way they frame their questions, which always tend to be coming from a different position.”

For a large part of his career, Cho says, “I felt that I was teaching white journalists about the Asian American experience.”

And not just journalists. While promoting Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Cho requested that the film’s publicists “open it up and have more ethnic reporters come in,” like those from Korean-language newspapers, to help get the word out about the movie.

Even his name has caused some conversations. Born in Seoul, Cho’s minister father named him ​​Yo-Han (or Johan), after John the Baptist. His last name in Korean is actually pronounced with a “J” sound instead of a “Ch” (this change, like a lot of immigrants or children of immigrants, he chalks up to “an Ellis Island kind-of moment”). To distinguish him from the many Chos in the world when he was first starting out, Korean-language newspapers would use the hanja symbol for his name. Eventually, he says his name became “a whole new linguistic moniker.”

Still, Cho is proud that he doesn’t have to use his middle initial for his acting credits, and that he’s the first John Cho registered with SAG-AFTRA.

He also welcomes the changing media landscape. “I used to think about what is the course of my career supposed to be; which is to say, in a political context,” he says. “There is one strain of thought, which is kind of a burdensome thought for Asian performers—or artists in general—and it’s to say, ‘Are we supposed to present our history? Or are we supposed to be creative without any of those constraints? Am I meant to actually create a screen history that exists on its own apart from a political history?’”

That strain hasn’t disappeared, but according to Cho, the burden has at least been dispersed: “Now, there are so many more talents that are visible and have power and can get things made and can get things done.”

Intentionally or not, though, Cho’s actually been doing whatever the opposite of whitewashing is for much of his career. The character he plays in Cowboy Bebop was voiced by a white actor in the English-language version of the anime series. Cho also starred in the much-beloved but short-lived Selfie, a modern take on the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion, as a version of Henry Higgins—one of the whitest of white male characters. I ask him if he thinks the scene that started it all—the “MILF” line in American Pie—would have been as memorable if it hadn’t been said by a person of color.

He thinks for a moment before saying, “Perhaps not.” To be honest, he adds, he has “complicated feelings about [that role].”

“I think what it did was, it created this category for me that didn’t exist. Which was, ‘oh, Asian, but like us’—meaning white people,” he says. “Sometimes, going against the stereotype [means] you’re still beholden to the stereotype, because you’re having to quote the stereotype in the new presentation. And I suppose I was a part of that, unwittingly. I think I did create a chair that then was filled by other people, eventually.”

Early on, says Cho, he was proud that his first roles had anglicized names. Now, he says, “we’re changing the last name because of me.”

Cho has embraced his culture in other ways as well: In March, he and author Sarah Suk published the middle-grade novel Troublemaker. Pulling loosely from Cho’s experiences growing up in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale while also influenced by the coverage of George Floyd’s killing, the story is about a Korean-born, American-raised tween coming of age during the 1992 unrest in Los Angeles—a time where news coverage depicted Korean and Korean American shop owners as militants standing on their businesses’ rooftops with guns ready.

Like a lot of people, Cho says he did some soul-searching during the pandemic; he was horrified to realize how little had changed since his childhood. Troublemaker is the kind of book parents might read with children as a way of explaining not just where they came from, but how much progress still needs to be made. Los Angeles, he notes, is “a highly gentrified town. People [only] tangentially interact with people who are not like themselves, and rarely give a thought as to what that person’s home life is.”

Another project he’s thinking about—one still very much in the hypothetical stage—is an all-Asian film adaptation of a Shakespearian play. He’s even called a friend who is a classically trained actor to brainstorm ideas. Cho knows that there have been Asian interpretations of Shakespeare’s work already, name-checking Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s King Lear–influenced 1985 film, Ran, for one. But his idea is to do it in English, because it’s the “language that I, personally, would just like to be challenged by and see where it goes.”

Has he given any thoughts to a part he’d like to play?

“I think I’m too old for Hamlet, but that’s the Mercedes. Is that the phrase?” he says sheepishly.

Maybe he should consider The Tempest’s Prospero—the closest thing the Bard had to a DILF.