Ke Huy Quan was 12 when a check for almost $100,000 arrived from Lucasfilm, a payment he says Steven Spielberg and George Lucas quietly arranged and one that changed his family’s finances.
The Oscar-winning actor describes the moment in his new memoir, “Never Say Die,” excerpted by Entertainment Weekly. Roughly two years after he signed on to play Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” Quan walked into the kitchen and found his parents at the table, his mother holding an envelope with his name on it. Both were smiling in surprise and disbelief. He had already been paid for the film and could not grasp why more money had come.
The check reflected a clause in his contract that gave him a share of the 1984 film’s earnings. The memoir calls it a residual. Quan credits Spielberg and Lucas, who devised the story and whose Lucasfilm produced the picture, with the arrangement and now sees it as a discreet act of generosity.
“Back then, almost no actors got a piece of a movie’s profits,” he writes. Even today, he says, only the biggest stars negotiate such terms, and a child in his first film receiving one was unheard of.
The studio had plenty to share. “Temple of Doom” followed the hit “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and grossed about $333 million worldwide. Quan says that made the gesture more generous, since everyone expected the sequel to earn a fortune.
The money mattered to a family that fled Vietnam as refugees, reunited and settled in Los Angeles, where Quan was still adjusting to a new country and language. He landed the role after accompanying his younger brother to an open casting call.
The memoir also recalls his bond with co-star Harrison Ford, who taught him to swim in a hotel pool after learning he feared water and whom Quan came to regard as something like an older brother. He later learned that Spielberg sometimes leaned on the child actor to lift Ford’s mood on difficult shooting days.
