Everything Everywhere Star Ke Huy Quan On Returning To The Screen, His Amazing Career And More

How did you prepare to get back into this, both in terms of acting and training?

When I got the role, I was really happy, but I was also very nervous stepping into it, because not only am I playing one character, but I'm playing three versions of the same character. It was very important to me from the get-go that the audience can distinguish these three different characters, by the way they sit, they stand, they move, how they walk and how they speak.

So to prepare myself, I hired an acting coach, a dialogue coach, a voice coach, so that I can sound slightly different. Then most interestingly, [I hired] a body movement coach, who had a really fascinating process. He would read the script, and pick specific animals for me to do. For example, for the alpha Waymond, because he's a fighter, he picked an eagle. For the CEO Waymond, because he's so cool, he's in a suit, he's got his hair slicked back, he picked a fox. 

For the Waymond in this universe, he picked a squirrel. I was required to watch countless hours of videos on YouTube, nothing but squirrels, how they move, how they crawl, how they eat, how they look. I was also required to print out pictures of different squirrels, and I had them like all over my wall to really get into the character. I would be on the ground crawling and moving around like a squirrel, and then slowly transform into Waymond.

Timothy Eulich, the stunt coordinator, says you practiced endlessly for that fanny pack fight sequence alone.

In terms of the fanny pack fight, I studied Taekwondo for many years, but that particular style was called Wushu Rope Dart. It was something that I've never learned before, and it's also something that is extremely hard to master. I spent a lot of weeks with Tim Eulich and our martial arts boys, Andy and Brian Le. They choreographed it, and then I trained with them for weeks. In fact, I even brought the fanny pack home, and I was swinging the fanny pack around my neck, around my shoulder, everywhere I went, watching TV, going into the kitchen, going into the bedroom, and I was constantly breaking things.

My wife wasn't too happy about it, but I'm glad I did all that preparation, because when it was time to shoot that sequence, it was scheduled for only one and a half days, including all the drama leading up to it ... the Daniels came up to me and said, "Listen, Ke, we know you've worked in Hong Kong with a lot of great action directors, and they all have the luxury of shooting, many, many takes to get it right, but we want you to know we have 70 shots to get through today, so we don't have that luxury. We have to get every shot in two or three takes." That's how we did it. It was always really rushed, but all that prep really came into play, and I'm quite proud of how it turned out.