Cho enjoys "injecting a face that looks like mine into a genre that has been pretty white"
In a Daily News interview, Harold & Kumar star John Cho revealed his inspiration for taking on The Grudge remake.
A few months ago, the trailer for the reboot of the classic Japanese horror was released.
Based on the classic Japanese horror of the same name, the 2020 film is directed by Nicolas Pesce (The Eyes of My Mother).
Also starring Andrea Riseborough, the film is more of a continuation of the Japanese franchise rather than a sequel.
Hollywood’s first English version of the film was in 2004 starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Cho told the Daily News that he has only recently attracted to the horror genre.
“I think that’s what attracts me to the horror genre in general late in life is its ability to use the genre to do things that aren’t being done in cinema right now,” he said.
Although the 47-year-old starred in horror TV show The Exorcist in 2017, Cho has purposely avoided the horror genre in film.
“I never wanted to purposely scare myself,” he said. “That’s why I stayed away from (the horror genre) for a long time, just had no desire to engage, even when my friends, you know as teenagers, were watching ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Halloween,’ I just was not into it.”
Cho recalled his “very traumatic experience” of watching Death Ship 2 at 6-years-old.
“We had just moved to the United States from Korea,” he said, adding that Korea was not showing R-rated films and that “everything was sort of for general audiences.”
“I was traumatized to see a woman murdered pretty gruesomely within the first couple minutes of the movie. But because we had paid the four bucks for the air conditioning, we did not leave,” Cho recalled.
His parents covered his and his brother’s eyes “whenever there was somebody getting killed. Or having sex. There was a lot of both on this death ship.”
When Cho took on his role in The Exorcist, he said he was encouraged to do so for diversity reasons.
“One of the drivers (to be in that show) was the fact that Asian American faces are unusually absent from the horror genre,” Cho said.
2017’s Get Out also altered his “thinking about horror completely.”
“What they were doing made me think about color also in the genre, which I hadn’t thought about, just because I was really disconnected from it,” Cho said of the film.
He added the film exposed him to the “freaking interesting vehicle” of the horror genre and that he “really just started thinking about horror as it related to my career … and thought, ‘I’d love to do one of these, something like this.’”
When taking on the role in The Grudge, Cho said the diversity of the film’s cast was certainly a factor.
He admitted that he does “like injecting a face that looks like mine into a genre that has been pretty white, for the most part.”
The Grudge will hit theatres on 3 January 2020.