Ke Huy Quan has been winning hearts since childhood, with breakout roles like Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data in The Goonies. After stepping away from acting for a while, Quan made an epic comeback with Everything Everywhere All At Once, which earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2022. Most recently he appeared in the romantic-action-comedy Love Hurts as a former hitman trying to have a regular life as a realtor.
More: Ke Huy Quan professes his abiding love for creative downtime (The Treatment, 2025)
For his Treat, Quan fondly recalls his time living in LA’s Chinatown, where he often visited small, local theaters to check out Hong Kong films. It was in one of these theaters where he discovered the 1983 action classic Project A, starring martial arts legend Jackie Chan. The film left him so captivated with its exhilarating fight scenes and breathtaking stunts that he and his brother would watch the movie on repeat. At home, the siblings would recreate the choreography and attempt to master the craft of making punches look convincingly real along the way.
This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What inspires me the most, when it comes to the action genre, is Jackie Chan's Project A.
I was living in Chinatown, Los Angeles and they had those small theaters where they only showed Hong Kong movies. I was blown away by those fight sequences and those stunts that they did. I was very entertained. They were funny, they were suspenseful.
[Project A is] such an incredible action movie. It really inspired me and got me interested in martial arts. I've seen it many, many times. In fact, my brother and I would watch it, and then [we] would go home and try to copy the choreography and do it ourselves.
Part of the fighting is the falling. It's the selling of the hits. You know, it's easy to throw a punch. It's very hard to sell a punch. In order to sell a punch, you have to snap your head back really fast and then also you have to put your whole body into it to make that punch look powerful.
What's so great about those end credits, the outtakes, is that it showed you that it was not fake. It wasn't a camera trick. It was all real, like they did it, and they got hurt. It makes you appreciate those fight scenes even more, knowing how dangerous they were.
They really make you feel like you're up on the screen fighting with them, your adrenaline is pumping, it's so fun to watch. That's when I felt like: “I want to make action movies. I want to make those kinds of action movies where you see the actors doing it all themselves.” There's no stunt doubles. That's what we were trying to pay homage to when we made Love Hurts.
