Ke Huy Quan rose to fame playing Short Road in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data in Richard Donner’s The Goonies, but the actor’s big-screen career didn’t take off as he had hoped. Quan even quit acting for nearly two decades before he returned to great acclaim with Everything Everywhere All at Once. The film won Quan an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and suddenly everyone wanted a piece of him. Quan’s next project will see him starring in Love Hurts, an action comedy in which he plays a seemingly mild-mannered realtor with a dark secret that he is desperate to leave behind. It wasn’t a choice Quan made lightly, and he even reached out to an old friend for advice.

“I was at an event with Steven Spielberg and he was asking me, ‘Ke, how are you doing?’ I said, ‘Steven, I’m not doing so well.’ Because of all the love and support that I had gotten during that whole award season, I was so worried that whatever I was going to do next, I would disappoint,” Quan told Empire. “Steven was very generous. He said, ‘Ke, let’s have lunch.’ And I told him about this project and kind of pitched it to him. He said, ‘Ke, it’s great. Do it.’“

Quan continued, “I didn’t think anybody that looks like me could star in this role. Luckily, they didn’t give up on me. They came back for a third time. I went in and they had these really elaborate slides with me as the main character. That’s when I started to see it a different way. ‘Oh, they’re trying to create a different kind of action hero. Not the type that we’ve seen for decades, but something new.’“

“Quan stars as Marvin Gable, a realtor working the Milwaukee suburbs, where ‘For Sale’ signs bloom. Gable receives a crimson envelope from Rose (Ariana DeBose), a former partner-in-crime that he had left for dead. She’s not happy,” reads the Love Hurts synopsis. “Now, Marvin is thrust back into a world of ruthless hitmen, filled with double-crosses and open houses turned into deadly warzones. With his brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu), a volatile crime lord, hunting him, Marvin must confront the choices that haunt him and the history he never truly buried.” The film is set to hit theaters on February 7th.

Quan is also set to star alongside Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown in The Electric State. Directed by the Russo brothers, the film is set in an alternate, retro-futuristic version of the 1990s, where sentient robots resembling cartoons and mascots, who once served peacefully among humans, now live in exile following a failed uprising. The film will debut on Netflix on March 14th.

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