Talk Easy Throwback: John Cho

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2019

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Another classic throwback for you this week! John Cho's career has undergone several transformations in the past two decades, each of them more interesting and impressive than the last. John appeared in several roles in smaller films before breaking through in the 2004 stoner comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Since then, he's made waves in blockbuster movies like the Star Trek reboot and Harold and Kumar sequels, underrated TV shows including Selfie and The Exorcist, and buzzed-about indies like Columbus, Gemini, and the upcoming Sundance favorite Searching. In this episode, he and Sam have a wide-ranging conversation that touches on everything from the strangeness of childhood memories to John's early days when acting just seemed like "fucking around," and even the reason he won't rewatch Harold & Kumar.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin. Lots of immigrants are told we came here for you. They tell their children this. They tell their six-year-old children this.
0:22.0	And what they're saying is, I own
0:26.5	you. This is a sinister interpretation, but I did this. Your end of the bargain is to live a respectable life for me.
0:36.5	And that was such a strong mental scaffolding for my life that, like I told you, I'm 45 and I'm starting to only think now about my own
0:45.9	happiness with my work so it's the easiest thing for me to think of what I do for somebody else. First it was my parents and then it was my wife and then it was
0:59.7	my children and so it's all about them.
1:05.2	And the much more difficult thing is to ask myself,
1:08.9	what makes you happy?
1:10.5	What do you want?
1:11.7	I'm so unaccustomed to thinking about that.
1:14.0	That I don't really have any answers.
1:18.0	That was John Cho. I'm San Francisco, and this is Talk Easy.
1:24.0	Welcome to the show. Oh, John Cho is an actor you know and you have definitely seen before and he probably
1:52.1	needs no introduction if you're
1:54.6	listening to this podcast or if you actively listen to this podcast but I will
1:59.9	list his main credits in case you need a refresher. He was Harold in
2:05.4	Kumar. He was Sulu in Star Trek. He has been on shows like Drunk History, House of
2:11.6	Lies, American Dad, New Girl, Bojack Horseman, the Mindy Project.
2:17.2	The point is if you've liked any piece of pop culture in the last 10 years, you've seen John Cho. I'll admit on the surface every time I thought of John
2:26.3	Cho I thought, God that seems like a really, really nice guy. And you know you create these preconceived notions of actors because you see
2:37.2	them so often on screen and you know if you have the chance to meet them, you realize that almost all of them, no matter who they are, end up being wildly different from the preconceived notions you had created.
2:51.0	I was exactly right about John Cho though. He is an incredibly
	...

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