John Cho and Aneesh Chaganty on ‘Searching’

In the new movie ‘Searching,’ John Cho plays David Kim, a father desperate to find his teenage daughter after she fails to return home from a high school study group one night.

What makes ‘Searching’ stand out from every other child-in-peril thriller is the way the drama is presented. The entire story unfolds on a computer screen--populated with emails, video chats, texts and tweets.

With no clue where his daughter Margot might have gone, David starts reaching out to her Facebook friends. He quickly learns that maybe he doesn’t know Margot as well as he thought--and that her online friendships don’t necessarily extend into real life.

The director and co-writer of ‘Searching’ is Aneesh Chaganty, who first came to the attention of the filmmaking world with a 2014 commercial he made for Google Glass.

For his first feature, Changanty had one dream lead in mind: John Cho. Cho has been acting for more than 20 years. It was 1999 when his character in ‘American Pie’ first graced us with the term MILF. More recently you may know him as Sulu in the new Star Trek movies.

When Cho and Changanty and joined Kim Masters in the studio, they started by talking about another one of Cho’s iconic roles--Harold from ‘Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.’ They also discussed the 2016 meme #StarringJohnCho. Two years later, there really is a big, mainstream movie starring John Cho--making him the first Asian American to headline a Hollywood thriller.