John Cho as Sulu
By Peter Canavese
John Cho will immediately crack wise if you call him on it, but he’s become a bona fide movie star. The Korean-born talent has been acting professionally for over a decade, but it was 2004’s “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” that made a Cho a leading man, playing Harold opposite Kal Penn’s Kumar.
With the long anticipated sequel “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay,” the franchise seriously ups the ante of sociopolitical humor that struck a nerve in the first film. Meanwhile, Cho has inherited the role of Hikaru Sulu from out actor George Takei in J.J. Abrams big-budget theatrical reboot of “Star Trek.”
Regarding the outrageous lengths of the sequel—in which the odd couple get arrested by federal marshals on an airplane, flee Guantanamo Bay, and smoke weed with George Bush—Cho jokes, “People without civil liberties: big laughs,” and admits that the potential task of a second sequel will be daunting for the writers. “I don’t know what the next step for Harold and Kumar will be—would be, theoretically. We seem to be at the limit. I mean, maybe we’d have to switch drugs. Go harder. I don’t know. Especially with the social and political humor. How much more could we do? So yeah, I don’t know. I’d be interested as anyone else to see what the writers come up with next…Thank God I’m not writing it…I think we have to go to heaven. ‘Harold and Kumar go to Heaven.’”
As for “Star Trek” and stepping into Takei’s shoes, Cho quips, “I always think that Leonard Nimoy is the real Asian on the show. But yeah, it was big shoes [to fill]. And I had lunch with George before we started filming…And he gave me what amounted to a blessing. I told him I was nervous, and in his typically classy way, he said, ‘Hey, relax, pretty soon people are going to refer to me as the guy that played the old version of John Cho.’
”One of the most memorable aspects of the first “Harold and Kumar” film was the raucous appearance by Neil Patrick Harris as “Neil Patrick Harris”: a fictional wildly heterosexual party animal. Though Harris has publicly come out since then, the sequel takes place just after the events of the first film, so the character remains a fictional cartoon. “I think people would’ve been really angry if we’d written him—if he came back as gay…I’m sure Neil wouldn’t have come back if we changed the role just because of his personal life. It’s separate, and this is a role that he’s playing. He’s not playing himself. So I’m glad that nobody in our camp and in the audience has tripped about it.”
“There’s a certain, you know, sweetness that comes from an adolescent viewpoint,” Cho says of the film’s exaggerated situations. “The view of sex and drugs seems to be from as innocent a place as is possible. Even the perviness isn’t really creepy. It’s a ‘boy looking through a keyhole’ kind of a thing. And I think there’s no way other people would respond well if they felt like the filmmakers and/or the actors or the characters were lotharios, you know what I mean?”
A U.C. Berkeley grad often included in the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, Cho was sure to add a shout-out to local audiences. “Just on a personal level, San Franciscans’ opinions or the Bay Area’s opinion of my work matters a lot to me. And they’ve been very supportive in the past, and I’ve had several movies play at this festival. So I just hope San Francisco likes it.”
Peter Canavese is a writer in San Jose.
Submitted by admin on Fri, 04/18/2008 - 10:36pm.
