Ke Huy Quan shared in his new memoir, “Never Say Die,” the feeling of receiving his first residual check of $100,000 for “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” as a child actor.
Because Quan was just 12 years old when he booked the role of Short Round in the 1984 film (his first major role as an actor), he didn’t realize he would receive residuals in addition to his base pay.
“One afternoon, I walked into the kitchen and found my parents standing together at the table,” Quan wrote in the memoir via Entertainment Weekly. “Mom was holding an envelope with my name printed across it. Dad had the papers that had been inside.”
He continued, writing, “They were both smiling, the kind of smile that comes from surprise and disbelief mixed together. They handed everything to me. It was a check from Lucasfilm. It was for almost $100,000, an amount that didn’t make any sense to me.”
“Back then, almost no actors got a piece of a movie’s profits,” Quan continued. “Even today, only the biggest stars do. That a kid like me, making his first film, would be included in something like that was unheard of. And ‘Temple of Doom’ wasn’t some small movie no one was expected to see. It was the sequel to a massive hit, a movie everyone knew would make a lot of money. That made their gesture even more generous.”
Quan noted that the “small share was life-changing for my family.”
As a child, Quan also starred in Richard Donner’s 1985 film “The Goonies” as Data. He returned to the spotlight in 2023 after decades for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” winning the Oscar for best supporting actor. His memoir, released Tuesday, details his early life fleeing Vietnam with his father, time in refugee camps, his life as a child actor and his triumphant return to the screen.