By Gill Pringle
“I fell into acting in college,” John Cho replies when asked how he became a performer. “I did not intend to do it. I was in a creative writing group, and there was a guy in the class…I thought of him as an older guy, but I realise now that he was actually twenty-years-old. But he was much older in my mind. He was directing a play, and he said, ‘Hey, how tall are you and what do you weigh? I think you’ll fit into this costume. One of my actors dropped out.’ So I tried it out. I’ve always thought that the reason that it worked out was because I thought that I was a weirdo, and the theatre was full of weirdos! It was like, ‘Oh! I found my family here.’ So it stuck. I didn’t dream about it, but it felt good. I kept going with it, and I learned how to do it. I didn’t know how to do it for a long time. I think that I was good at it because I didn’t know how to do it, and then I learned how to do it, and I was terrible! I knew how to do it, and now I’m in a phase where I’m trying to get good at it again.”
Cho has been getting good at it since the late nineties, when he scored the role of Tiger Woods’ buddy, Jerry Chang, in a TV movie biopic of the famous golfer. Cho has since appeared in scores of movies and TV shows, most notably in the hilarious Harold & Kumar series. He also famously played Henry Higgs on the sitcom Selfie, co-starring Karen Gillan, where he became the first Asian-American romantic male lead on American television. Right now, however, John Cho is best known for playing Sulu in the new Star Trek movies. Also an occasional writer in his spare time, Cho baulks when asked if he’d like to follow in the footsteps of his Star Trek co-star, Simon Pegg, by penning an installment of the sci-fi franchise. “Oh wow, I hadn’t thought of that,” the actor laughs. “I would probably start with something more personal, or something that I know. I have trouble knowing the Star Trek universe. There are so many ins and outs, and I have problems with the vocabulary.”
Is he a sci-fi fan? “Not really,” Cho replies. “I don’t really read it in my spare time. I watch it, on occasion. It has to be good. I find that with sci-fi, if the rules are too broad, and if the world is too big, if anything goes, then I’m disinterested. The rules have to be established well for me to engage in it. But when it’s done well, it’s one of the best ways to think about ourselves. It always starts for me with a character that has something that needs to be fixed. A hole in their heart that needs to be filled through the course of the story.”
Star Trek Beyond is in cinemas now.
