John Cho Quotes
- All Quotes
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I would love to do Shakespeare, either onstage or on film.
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Whenever I meet a Korean, I ask about their immigration history.
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I feel like there's this need that the Asian-American community has to feel like people. It's something that Asians in Asia do not understand about us.
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Early on, I played a Chinese delivery person, and even that, which was very innocuous, felt like I was somehow betraying myself. I felt very self-conscious on set doing that role, with a crew that was almost entirely white.
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One of the things I like about comedy in general is that it affords Asian Americans the opportunity to not be noble.
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I think my parents were surprisingly cool with me entering the arts. Although, I think they thought it was going to be a phase, and they didn't expect me to actually stick with it, and rightfully so. They were concerned whether I could afford groceries, being an actor.
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The key to doing 'Harold and Kumar' movies is you make it earnest. Primarily what we do is make Harold and Kumar's relationship and friendship believable, and we don't actually work on being that funny.
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Asians narratively in shows are insignificant. They're the cop or the waitress or whatever it is. You see them in the background.
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I think Hollywood acts like followers of culture and is constantly seeking to follow trends.
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I just didn't see anyone on TV who looked like me, and then I saw George Takei being cool and piloting the spaceship on television.
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Movies may be as close to a document of our national culture as there is; they're supposed to represent what we believe ourselves to be. So when you don't see yourself at all - or see yourself erased - that hurts.
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I like that guy Matthew Perry a lot.
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I am a little curmudgeonly about new media.
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Even though there's a lot of horror from Asia in the American cinematic tradition, I hadn't seen Asians at the center of it.
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I've thought for years, sometimes against my will, about what kind of son I'm supposed to be, what's expected. Being Korean, that's a particularly charged question. Is your duty to your culture or to your parent? Is your life your own, or the second half of your parents' life? Who owns your life?
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Actors are supposed to be these runaways that get in a covered wagon filled with hats and tambourines and go from town to town making people smile.
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I don't know what the next frontier is, but good comedy should put its toe into taboo waters. You have to transgress a little bit, and that area shifts with culture and with the year.
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That's a huge part of being a human being: looking for love and finding a partner in this world. When you constantly play characters who don't have that life, it feels incomplete and not totally human.
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Our species likes being social.
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It's hard in America as a writer of color, an actor of color, not to get caught up in race and culture. But you're also supposed to be able to write characters and scenes in a way where it's just a matter of fact, a component.
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I don't know if I trust entertainment to teach anyone anything.
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I campaigned for Obama, and that was such a big component of getting the vote out, was social media.
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I wanted to do 'Manzanar' because I'd never done anything like it before. The spoken word there is between a drama and an essay, and I'd never worked in concert with an orchestra.
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The more roles there are, the more actors there are.