Before Star Trek XI sends John Cho's career into the stratosphere, he is happy to be earthbound in Harold and Kumar II.
By Pam Grady, FilmStew.com
The new cordless phone gave John Cho pause.
When the actor first read Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg's script for what would become Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, he remembers thinking, 'They're going to open an FBI file on us for sure.' Sure enough, after shooting on the sequel wrapped, Cho started hearing clicks on his new phone.
"I kept hearing this clicking, and I thought, 'They've found me. They tapped my phone. Bush is mad!'" he laughs during a recent interview with FilmStew.
Taking a break from his duties as the newest Sulu, the 35-year-old Cho is in an ebullient mood as he attends the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. In addition to the foul-minded Kumar flick, he has another film screening at the event, Michael Kang's thriller West 32nd, in which Cho plays a lawyer who gets in over his head when he mixes it up with gangsters in Queens' Koreatown neighborhood.
For Cho, the visit is a kind of homecoming. He graduated from U.C. Berkeley with an English degree and made his professional debut as an actor in a Berkeley Repertory Theatre adaptation of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. His big screen debut, Quentin Lee and Justin Lin's Shopping for Fangs, made its world premiere at 1997's SFIAFF.
Sitting down just prior to the Kabuki Theatre screening of Guantanamo, Cho confesses that he is a little nervous about the audience. "Just on a personal level, the Bay Area's opinion of my work matters a lot to me," he says. "They've been very supportive in the past."
Not that he has much reason to worry. He has already seen the movie with a crowd at Austin's South by Southwest festival where he estimates at least a quarter of the dialogue was lost to laughter. "It was absolutely insane," he marvels. "There was so much raucousness. I was shocked by how big it was playing there."
He only hopes that that reaction will be the norm and not an anomaly. The sequel to Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle picks up exactly where the first movie left off, as those perpetual stoners, Harold (Cho) and his best buddy Kumar (Kal Penn), prepare to fly to Amsterdam. But when Kumar's smokeless bong is mistaken for a bomb on board the plane, the pals find themselves interned in the notorious camp. They quickly manage an escape, taking to the road in a mad dash to clear their names.
In truth, the movie is not as funny as it should be. Hurwitz and Schlossberg's refusal to take sides in what ought to be as much a political satire as a stoner comedy ultimately works against it, robbing the movie of some badly needed bite. On the plus side, Cho and Penn's amiable goofball chemistry remains a potent comic force and Neil Patrick Harris returns with another hysterically self-lacerating cameo.
When thie first Harold and Kumar came out in July of 2004, Cho was probably most famous for being the guy who coined the term "MILF" in the first American Pie movie, while Penn's biggest role up to that time was as Taj in Van Wilder. White Castle was Hurwitz and Schlossberg's first produced screenplay. Neither the audience nor anyone involved in making the movie knew what to expect when the movie opened.
"I kind of think we got the benefit of the doubt with the first one from both audiences and critics," Cho suggests. "They were kind. We had the element of surprise. I felt like the movie was so refreshing, because of the casting and the subject matter and stuff. I thought that went a long way towards endearing us to the audience and critics."
"To our surprise, the racial and political stuff was a bigger factor in people enjoying the movie than we thought it would have been," he adds. "It was really important to them. It became sort of our calling card. When it came to do the second one, we felt that had to be a real part of the second movie."
Not that the second movie was a done deal at first. Though Hurwitz and Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with the idea that it would mark the start of a franchise, the film's $18 million box office performance put the brakes on that idea. But the $9 million production has since gone on to rake in upwards of $60 million on DVD, thus reviving the notion of a sequel. Personally, Cho thinks it is a vastly different movie than what might have made had the pause between films been shorter.
"The logical story would have been to have them go to Europe, to go to Amsterdam and get in trouble, but they felt that wasn't funny enough and so they devised a way to get off track," he says.
"All the political stuff in the movie, all the plot that they devised was just a way to get laughs," Cho continues. "I mean, they just decided we'll amp up the stakes and it'll be funnier, because their lives are in danger. And that's funny. People without civil liberties β big laughs!"
For Cho, it all comes down to page five. By that point in reading a screenplay, he knows whether the project is one worth pursuing. His one hard and fast rule that he adopted early in his career even before he could afford to be choosy is to avoid roles that are nothing more than stereotypes.
"I just never thought it would be worth it to me, monetarily or otherwise, to do a stereotypical role," he explains. "I think it's important to say no to things that don't feel right to you as an actor. If you take those roles, there is a consequence for everyone, for a community - the problem is, as an actor, you're viewed as peer by producers and directors and if you agree to do something, you're tacitly saying, 'Write more of these roles."
At this point in his career, Cho does not have to worry so much about even seeing scripts like that. Between Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, West 32nd and Star Trek alone, the roles span quite the range, from affable stoner to driven yuppie to intrepid space traveler.
He politely deflects questions about Star Trek lest he reveal any spoilers, only allowing that the new edition is a little more youthful and more athletic than the earlier franchise. And he admits to being excited about starring in a movie based on a franchise he enjoyed as a kid.
About his other franchise, never say never, but he senses Guantanamo might be the end of the line for Harold and Kumar. "We seem to be at the limit," he admits. "Maybe we'd have to switch drugs, go harder, especially with the social and political. How much more can we do? I'd be interested to see what the writers up with next."
"Thank God I'm not writing it - I think we have to go to heaven," Cho muses. "I'd certainly be up for it⦠Listen, if there's demand; we'll just see how this one does."
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