All About Love Hurts Star Ke Huy Quan and His Wife Echo
Get set to break some funny bones with Oscar winner Quan when Love Hurts hits theaters on February 7.
Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan is about to lay the hilarious smack down on a gang of pursuing baddies when Universal Pictures’ new action comedy Love Hurts throws the first punch in theaters everywhere beginning February 7 (get tickets here). But from his present-day acting revival all the way back to his eternally awesome childhood roles in 1980s classics Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, one thing’s always remained constant: Even when he’s being just a little bit bad, it’s impossible for Quan not to be funny.
Quan’s remarkable return to the big screen, highlighted by his Academy Award-winning performance as Waymond Wang in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once, came after a lengthy two-decade hiatus that put a lot of separation between his childhood and adult film roles. But as you’ll find out below, he hasn’t exactly been in hiding — in fact, an uplifting thread of consistency has signified Quan’s lengthy screen career, buoyed by the unwavering support of Echo Quan, his wife of more than 20 years.
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Ke Huy Quan as a child actor: Indiana Jones, Goonies & more
Born in Saigon, South Vietnam and eventually emigrating to the Los Angeles area as a post-war refugee with his family while still a child, Quan landed the role of a lifetime when he debuted opposite Harrison Ford as Short Round, Indy’s 12-year-old sidekick, in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Short Round’s funny, faithfully loyal vigil over Indy’s safety (not to mention some mad taxi driving skills) assured Quan an iconic place of honor in both Indiana Jones lore as well as in broader cinema history (his Temple of Doom performance earned him an early Saturn Award for Best Performance by a Younger Actor). Within a year, he was back at work in another Steven Spielberg movie collaboration — this time in the role of Richard "Data" Wang in The Goonies, holding down the fort as the gang’s gadget-savvy resident James Bond fan.
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Quan continued to act into his early 20s, landing roles in the Japanese film Passengers and, as some sitcom fans might remember, as Jasper Kwong in later seasons of TV's Head of the Class (1990-1991). On the big screen, Quan also appeared in Breathing Fire (1991) and opposite Pauly Shore and Brendan Fraser in Encino Man (1992), before his acting opportunities began to taper and he decided to take a fresh approach to the screen industry — this time from the other side of the camera.
A break from acting: Ke Huy Quan goes behind the scenes
Quan entered the film program at the University of Southern California in the 1990s, graduating in 1999 after developing Voodoo, a student-created horror-comedy flick that earned the Audience Award at the 2000 Slamdance Film Festival. “…I started working for some really fun and great people,” Quan shared with Entertainment Weekly in 2022, including a productive professional relationship with action choreographer Corey Yuen.
“He took me under his wing and started teaching me about action and action sequences and how to choreograph them,” Quan explained to EW, launching a mentorship that eventually landed him on the set of 2000’s X-Men as a fight sequence choreographer himself. He re-teamed with Yuen the following year to help orchestrate fight scenes for Jet Li in The One (2001), and continued to keep busy on various film projects until being brought on board as an assistant director for the critically-acclaimed Hong Kong-based romantic drama 2046.
All about Ke Huy Quan's wife Echo Quan: A long-lasting movie marriage
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but Quan’s involvement in 2046 turned out to be a seismically life-changing event. Thanks to a fortuitous introduction from 2046 director Wong Kar-wai, Quan met his future wife Echo (a film language translator) during the movie’s Hong Kong production.
After briefly dating, the two tied the knot and eventually moved together to Los Angeles, where some time passed before Quan encountered another stroke of serendipity. Energized by the success of 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians, he found renewed hope in Hollywood’s embrace of Asian talent, as he shared with Variety in the wake of his breakout reemergence in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once.
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“When Crazy Rich Asians came out and I saw my fellow Asian actors up on the screen, I wanted to be up there with them,” Quan confided. “…When I decided to get back to acting, I thought I would get little roles here and there, but never in my wildest imagination did I think that a script like this would be in front of me and provide an opportunity to audition for one of the greatest roles I’d ever read.”
Everything Everywhere, in fact, became an official couple’s project for both Ke and Echo. He landed an eventual Oscar-winning role, while she served as a multilingual translator on set. “This is her first job in the industry since she has moved here,” directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert raved in a since-deleted Twitter post (via People). “She teared up when we hired her. But we’re the lucky ones!”
Ke Huy Quan: Back in the acting spotlight
Red carpet watchers have little trouble spotting Ke and Echo at big premieres these days; they’re kinda famous for showing up — all dashing and debonair — in smart complementary suits.
But there’s far more to their 20-year marriage than mere sartorial agreement, as Quan’s heartfelt Best Supporting Actor acceptance speech at the 2023 Academy Awards will forever attest. “I owe everything to the love of my life, my wife Echo,” he said, “who month after month, year after year, for 20 years told me that one day, one day, my time will come.”
Since the success of Everything Everywhere All at Once, Quan has been racking up a slew of high-profile acting gigs in Hollywood. He was featured in Season 2 of the Marvel TV series Loki, gave voice to Han the thieving pangolin in DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda 4, and — in addition to his leading Love Hurts role — is set to appear this year as an animated voice in Zootopia 2 while also joining the huge ensemble star cast of The Electric State, the upcoming 2025 science fiction adventure film from directing duo the Russo brothers.
How to watch Ke Huy Quan in Love Hurts
Love Hurts puts Quan front and center as Marvin Gable, a mild-mannered real estate agent leading a quiet and happy life in the suburbs of Milwaukee. He takes pride in his job and seems to be doing just fine… until a pair of cryptic (and slightly ominous) messages, one bearing the warning that “love hurts” — arrives one day in the mail.
There’s something familiar to Marvin about that phrase, and it revives some deeply buried demons from his distant criminal past. To put his former life behind him once and for all, he’ll have to learn to stop apologizing so nicely after landing each well-placed punch — all while remembering the deadly assassin’s skills that formerly earned him an underworld reputation as a much less friendly sort of fellow in the first place.
Joining Quan on his action-packed comedy blast from the past is fellow Oscar winner Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) as Rose, Marvin's criminal ex-partner; Daniel Wu (Into the Badlands) as Marvin’s vengeful long-lost brother, Alvin “Knuckles” Gable; Mustafa Shakir (Luke Cage) as the poetry-loving hitman Roger, aka "The Raven”; Lio Tipton (Crazy, Stupid, Love.) as Marvin's hapless real estate assistant; Rhys Darby (Our Flag Means Death) as eccentric number-cruncher Kippy Betts; Sean Astin (The Goonies) as Marvin's real estate boss; and Marshawn Lynch (watch for Marvin to duck a slapstick swing or two from the NFL great) as a brawny, lunkheaded enforcer-goon.
From the producers of Nobody and Violent Night, Universal Pictures’ Love Hurts premieres in theaters everywhere beginning Friday, February 7. Grab your tickets here!
