John Cho and I are supposed to talk about Cowboy Bebop, Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the classic anime series, but once he learns I’m calling him from Brooklyn, the first thing he wants to discuss is Kyrie Irving. This is just a few days before Aaron Rodgers will test positive for COVID-19, which means Kyrie is still the public face of anti-vax athletes. Cho, though, seems less interested in parsing the morality of Irving’s stance than in pondering why he’s taking it. “I find it interesting that two of Brooklyn’s stars — Kevin Durant and Kyrie — are so clearly not self-actualized, and they found one another on the same team,” he says. “KD is obviously much less volatile. But they’re just young men.”
Cho, himself still young-looking at 49, knows something about self-actualization. He’s been acting professionally since 1997, and though you probably know him from one of a handful of signature roles — as uptight stoner Harold Lee, or as the latest incarnation of U.S.S. Enterprise lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, or as the MILF guy — he has in the last few years started booking the meaty leading roles that eluded him in the early part of his career. Part of this was down to timing: In 2016, Cho became the unlikely face of a social media movement calling for greater diversity in Hollywood. But by the time Hollywood was prepared to offer roles to people who look like him, Cho had also proven himself to be a talented, sensitive actor. Watching him take center stage in a role like Cowboy Bebop, or the indie drama Columbus, or the technological thriller Searching, was immensely rewarding. He’s familiar, but not too familiar, which means each of these performances immediately grabs your attention — “hey, it’s Harold and/or Sulu and/or the Canadian meth dealer from 30 Rock” — before revealing serious depth. He can mix dramatic intensity with dry humor; he knows how to recede into a scene, and how to attack the moment with verve. Also, he’s very handsome.
He’s still getting used to this new kind of recognition: the posters for Cowboy Bebop center his face, and only his face. And as Spike Spiegel, futuristic bounty hunter with perfectly bouncy hair and a mysterious past, Cho once again has the opportunity to pursue new artistic frontiers. Spike carries a big gun, and he’s also an expert martial artist, so much of Cho’s work went toward capturing that physicality. (John Cho shooting people is new; John Cho working out with his shirt off, as we see in the series premiere, is definitely new.) Cowboy Bebop is set in a post-Earth outer space society where the capitalistic forces that will presumably bleed this planet dry are busy draining the rest of the universe, and Cho perfectly captures the world-weary romanticism and sharp wit required to get along in this dire future. We spoke about his increased visibility over the last few years, how he approached Cowboy Bebop, his early brushes with Asian-American cinema, and more.
In the last few years, you’ve been in a number of movies where you are the billed lead talent. I was curious about how you’ve felt that shift, as an actor.
In some ways, I’m the least qualified to answer that. My career has been a very steady climb. The graph for me is just this [holds hand at chest level]. I see other careers, and they’re like these [traces ascending peak through the air]. So it feels very incremental to me. In some ways, in the beginning, I was recognized as a novelty for my race. It was like, “Oh, it’s an Asian guy that can do comedy,” or — and this is just me speculating — an Asian guy that doesn’t feel too Asian or too foreign. Feels like “one of us,” whoever “us” is. And now, more and more, I feel like if people want me, it’s because I’m a decent actor. That feels tremendous, to me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, really.
What drew you to Cowboy Bebop, besides enjoying the script?
I had been wondering if I could do something like this — a physical role, an action role. And yet, I have to say I wasn’t particularly artistically interested in those things except for “Oh, I haven’t done that; that would be fun to do.” I was wondering if something like that would ever come along, and if so, would I respond to the material. What would be the world in which I would want to do something like that?
I read the script first, and it was totally original, totally funny, totally smart, witty, and such a collage of genres. I just thought, “Maybe I could get into this.” I didn’t know about the anime, but when I watched it — three minutes in, I could see why this has a tremendous following. It’s just smarter than anything else out there. And I’ve said this before, but Spike, in the show, touches so many shores of all these genres I’m really interested in: film noir, westerns, action, sci-fi. And I thought it would be fun to touch so many bases. I’m mixing metaphors, I apologize.
You were in the Star Trek movies, which also have an intense fanbase. Are there any commonalities, in terms of navigating external expectations?
I’ll let you know, I’m just starting the Cowboy Bebop fan interaction. What happened was I took the job, and then we moved out of the country, so I’ve just been in this bubble with it. [Cowboy Bebop was filmed in New Zealand, where Cho and his family have lived for most of the last year.] Shooting outside of the U.S. made it feel like a strangely private experience. We were on an island on the other side of the world, making this show, doing the best we could. We were aware it was a big fanbase, and everyone on set was a fan, but the idea of the fandom — I wasn’t confronted with that until right now.
I hope the experience is like Star Trek, in that the Star Trek fans were rooting for us. I never felt like the rubber band was going to snap; I just felt like they wanted us to succeed. I hope that’s the Cowboy Bebop experience, and first indications are that is the case. I’m sure there are people who are waiting to take us apart, and I hope that’s a very small minority. The anime’s not going away, so that’s good. We’re just adding our own chapter to it.
For as long as I’ve known about Cowboy Bebop, Spike has been the platonic ideal of an anime protagonist: this effortlessly cool slacker with a tragic past, who’s a badass action star but also relatable. As an actor, how do you even approach that?
Man, it was tough. I had to simplify it a lot for myself. The spiel you just said — those are all things one observes that are not necessarily internal. The first thing was getting proficient, to some level — the believability with the martial arts and the physicality. It really started there, and I’m not accustomed to starting in a physical place for a character. But that’s where I felt was the right place.
So then I started to go, “Okay, I’m the guy who can do this,” which was unexpectedly a lot of it for me. Like, okay: Spike is the guy who can execute these moves. And then it went into trying to move like Spike, from the anime. He does have a pretty distinctive physicality, and I was trying to see if I could borrow a lot of that. Then it became textbook, and after that it was taking our character history, and trying to form a character based off of that. But the initial baby steps were about his body, in a lot of ways, even though his body does not exist in real life. [laughs] I’ll tell you that. I think he might be nine feet tall.
I know you tore your ACL at one point. What is the training for that role like?
Mostly, it was skill-based. The cosmetic parts came about in a natural way. In boot camp, it was very rigorous — they were actually getting us into shape. Not “filling out the costume” shape. We went from punching and kicking and tumbling and weapons work, and we would also do weight lifting and stuff. It was a combination of just about every physical discipline I could think of. I would say it was like going to college for killing someone. [laughs] During the experience of boot camp, I came out of it going, “This is the oldest human endeavor, killing one another.” We’ve been working on this for millennia, it’s unbelievable. The amount of data that exists on how to injure someone is extraordinary.
This the first time we’ve seen you as a guns-blazing, stunt-pulling action lead. We’ve talked a bit about the physicality, but what other things did you discover in the performance?
I guess what I was pleased with was trying to put character into all of those action moves. I’ll take the opportunity to pat myself on the back. Looking back at it, I was like, “I know who that person is that’s executing those moves.” We didn’t use templates. I think it was expressive of the show, and of the character, in all those fight scenes. There was a story being told during those fight scenes. Coming into it, that’s one of those things I was like — can we do that? Can I do that? Can I do those moves and act at the same time? [laughs] And I think we got there.
I wanted to ask about these two movies you were in, at the start of your career: Shopping for Fangs and Yellow.
Holy shit. [laughs]
These are before Better Luck Tomorrow, during this wave of independent Asian cinema in the ’90s. How do you look back at those movies, at this stage in your career?
Very fondly. The only regret I have is that those filmmakers didn’t break through in the mainstream — those films didn’t break through in the mainstream the way they might be able to do now, with the help of technology. You know, I do feel like the internet has made so many things possible. It has allowed audiences to find films that they couldn’t find before. Those films are of high quality, or that’s how I remember them, and if we had the help of that technology, I think we could have gotten there.
I look back on it with admiration for those filmmakers, for what they were trying to do at that time. It was a time when I felt like it was much more— what was going on in the air was people were trying to do something very original, all the time. It was a really special time in feature filmmaking. I feel like now, the best ideas are in television, but that was a time when features really ruled culture. People would talk about features at dinner, and it’s much less so now. And so I look back on those movies — those are my first two features — with real fondness and admiration.
I was struck by something you said in a previous interview: that you thought you would literally never see the day of Asian representation happening more in Hollywood. And given where we are now, I was wondering how that compares with what you and the Asian filmmakers around you talked about.
When I was young, I was like, “I look back 50 years, and in terms of representation, we’ve barely made any progress.” Extrapolating from that — 50 years from now, the math tells me it’s not going to be much better. [laughs] I was pessimistic, and just hopeful that I could make a living. That was the biggest win I could think of, at the time — just to survive.
So what we’re living in now is beyond what I ever imagined. I don’t know what to make of it, really. There’s just so many people, and I’m trying to make a real concerted effort to know more of them, to reach out to them, to talk with them. I want to work with the Asian-Americans who are coming up right now. And there are so many, I don’t know where to start. It’s exciting; there’s so much going on, I’m almost disoriented from it.
This is very unprofessional, but I have to say that Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle remains one of the most important movies for me. I always say it was my Crazy Rich Asians.
[laughs] I always say that that movie is — it’s not traditionally seen as an Asian-American movie, but it is to me. I like it being seen as an Asian-American movie, you know?
Jeremy Gordon is a writer in Brooklyn whose work appears in the New York Times, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.