Ke Huy Quan is revisiting a formative Hollywood moment in his new memoir, Never Say Die: the day a residual check from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom arrived with a figure so large it was difficult for him to comprehend.
Quan writes that his first residual check for the 1984 film was almost $100,000, a sum he describes as life-changing for his family. At the time, he was a child actor who had booked the role of Short Round at age 12, marking his first major acting role. According to the memoir, he did not understand that money beyond his base pay would be coming his way.
“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: “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.”
The passage captures Quan’s sense of surprise not just at the size of the payment, but at the fact that it existed at all. In the memoir, he explains that receiving a share tied to a movie’s success was not something he expected as a young performer making his first film.
“Back then, almost no actors got a piece of a movie’s profits,” Quan wrote. “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 adds in the book that the “small share was life-changing for my family.”
The revelation is one of the personal Hollywood memories included in Never Say Die, which was released Tuesday. The memoir covers Quan’s early life fleeing Vietnam with his father, his time in refugee camps, his experience as a child actor and his later return to the screen.
After Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Quan also appeared as Data in Richard Donner’s 1985 film The Goonies. Decades later, he returned to the spotlight in 2023 with Everything Everywhere All at Once, winning the Oscar for best supporting actor.
In sharing the story of the Lucasfilm check, Quan frames one of his earliest industry experiences as both bewildering and deeply meaningful: a moment when a 12-year-old newcomer encountered a level of compensation he had not known was possible, and one that made an immediate difference to his family.