Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan has revealed that his first residual payment for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was a life-changing $100,000 check, a surprise he received as a child actor that he still describes as “generous.”
Quan, who was just 12 when he played Short Round in Steven Spielberg’s 1984 blockbuster, said he had no idea residuals even existed beyond his initial salary. In his new memoir Never Say Die, he recounts walking into the kitchen to find his parents holding an envelope from Lucasfilm with his name on it.
“They were both smiling, the kind of smile that comes from surprise and disbelief mixed together,” Quan wrote. “It was a check from Lucasfilm. It was for almost $100,000, an amount that didn’t make any sense to me.”
Quan admitted he “didn’t understand how more money could suddenly appear” after already being paid for his work on the film. He later came to see the residuals clause as “a quiet gesture from Steven and George [Lucas].”
“Back then, almost no actors got a piece of a movie’s profits,” he explained. “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.”
He added: “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.”
For Quan’s family, the windfall was transformative. He noted that the “small share was life-changing for my family.”
Read more: Oscar Winner Ke Huy Quan Immortalized at TCL Chinese Theatre With Hand And Footprint Ceremony
Years later, he has never forgotten Spielberg’s role in launching his career. When accepting his 2023 Golden Globe for Everything Everywhere All at Once, Quan made a point to thank the director.
“As I grew older, I started to wonder if that was it, if that was just luck,” he said at the time. “For so many years, I was afraid I had nothing more to offer. No matter what I did, I would never surpass what I achieved as a kid.”
