Ke Huy Quan on What He Learned From Goonies, Indiana Jones, and Everything Everywhere

Over the course of the last 40 years, Ke Huy Quan has done many things: worked with some of the greatest movie stars of all-time like Harrison Ford and Michelle Yeoh; starred in bonafide classics across multiple decades; studied martial arts with Tan Tao-liang and action stunt choreography under Corey Yeun; and won an Oscar.

Still, the thing he’s been consistently asked over all that time, and across so many projects, remains the same: when are we getting a Goonies sequel? Well, 40 years after that original Richard Donner classic was released, Quan still doesn’t have a definite answer, but when we catch up with the actor in Beverly Hills on the eve of the premiere to his next film, Love Hurts, he can’t stop smiling about achieving the next best thing: a Goonies reunion in his first feature as the lead actor on the poster.

“It was emotional for Gable in the movie but also for me personally, too, to share the screen with Sean Astin after 40 years,” Quan muses with a smile of genuine satisfaction. Indeed, Love Hurts sees Quan and Astin both play pals in a nondescript American small town where Quan’s Marvin Gable is the most popular realtor on the block. He’s also a reformed ruthless assassin, not that his real estate boss Cliff (Astin) realizes this in their chummy sequences.

Says Quan, “When we shot our scenes together that day, Jeff Cohen, aka Chunk—who is also my entertainment lawyer—came to visit, and he was watching the monitor the whole time, and I felt like I was a kid again.” The actor even got photos of three former Goonies, who fans might recognize as Mikey, Chunk, and Data, together once more on a film set.

“Will we ever get a Goonies sequel?” Quan ponders aloud. “I don’t know, but before that happens, this movie is this little tease.”

The movie is also a kind of culmination to a lifetime of lessons in and around the film industry for Quan, whose professional career began at the tender age of 12 on the set of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In that time, he’s had a mercurial relationship with the movie business, which invited him in to make an indelible impression as a child in films like Indiana Jones and Goonies, but for much of his adult life kept Quan at arm’s length, even when he worked as a stunt coordinator and second-unit director in the 2000s.

That obviously changed with Everything Everywhere All at Once, the genre-bending emotional epic from the Daniels. The galaxy-brained swing won many folks involved, including the Daniels and Quan, Oscar gold. We were there, too, when that movie had its world premiere at SXSW and were among the first to welcome Quan back to a life in front of the camera, although he tells us now that even after shooting that sci-fi/martial arts hybrid which showed off his physical prowess, he had no expectation a few years later he would be leading his own martial arts comedy like Love Hurts.

“I remember that night well… [and] I was just so happy and so grateful to be part of that journey [on] Everything Everywhere,” says Quan. “It was my first time back as an actor, and when we premiered Everything Everywhere at SXSW, and seeing myself for the first time on the screen after so many years, it was very incredible but also emotional for me. I was just so happy to have a job.”

Quan says he didn’t think he could be an action star until he got the script for Love Hurts. But those pages represented a big moment for Quan, who finally gets to be the first name on the production call sheet and poster—and for a project that plays to his strengths in terms of physicality, humor, and even sweetness. Aye, Quan’s Gable is a surprisingly kind-hearted killer! And his journey to this point—with opportunities to see how legends like Harrison Ford, Michelle Yeoh, or Jamie Lee Curtis handle stardom—has prepared him to understand what it means to be the lead actor, or simply a leader, on a film set.

“I saw how they did it,” Quan says of Ford and Yeoh. “When they walk onto the set, they make sure that everybody feels loved and welcome, and feel that no matter what you were doing, what position you were in, that your contribution in the movie is just as important as theirs. So for me, stepping onto the set of Love Hurts, I wanted to emulate that, I wanted to make sure that everybody, we all felt like a big family, and to me making a movie is a huge privilege and it should be fun.”

The lesson seemed to stick for Quan and his collaborators as well. This includes another Oscar winner in Ariana DeBose, who plays a femme fatale with a complicated past in Love Hurts. But before she portrayed Rose to Quan’s Gable, DeBose also won her own Oscar and a slew of other awards for West Side Story, which provided her with the opportunity in 2023 to hand out many of the same prizes to Quan for Everything Everywhere.

“I can safely say that it’s so nice to have been on a set and had my beliefs about a person affirmed,” DeBose says about working with Quan on Love Hurts. “Sometimes that doesn’t happen, but he is everything that you want him to be. He’s charming, he’s lovely, he’s just so generous. And we worked from a place of mutual admiration and respect, and it made for a really fun sandbox, and we could take some really big risks, whether it be in a fight sequence or just in a scene, and feel safe to do it together.”

It was a chance for them to both lead a different kind of action movie, one which promises to give audiences a kick just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Love Hurts opens on Friday, Feb. 7.

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