After 700 credits, James Hong isn’t done yet
Walk of Fame star spurs more offers for trailblazing actor, 93
In 1953, James Hong left Minnesota with a buddy in a Buick and hit Route 66, bound for California.
After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, during which he put on shows for his fellow troops, the Minneapolis native planned to spend a summer in Los Angeles before resuming his engineering studies back home. Then an unlikely big break changed his life: impressing Groucho Marx with an impression of Groucho Marx on an episode of “You Bet Your Life.”
He moved to LA, got an agent and started booking small roles. The rest was history — much to the initial disapproval of his tradition-minded parents.
“They thought I was crazy. They thought I was no good,” said Hong, 93, with a smile on a recent afternoon at his Beverly Hills home. “James Hong had to be a black sheep and become an actor.” Back then, he had no idea how far his acting dreams would take him, the challenges he’d face as a Chinese American in Hollywood, or that he’d become one of the most prolific film and TV performers in U.S. history.
So it was an emotional affair when, almost 70 years later, the “Blade Runner,” “Big Trouble in Little China” and “Kung Fu Panda” actor received his star on the Walk of Fame in May in front of the former Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. With nearly 700 film, television and video game credits to date, he became the oldest person and one of relatively few Asian American and Pacific Islanders to do so as family, friends, fans and jubilant lion dancers cheered him.
“It was well-deserved,”
said actor and producer Daniel Dae Kim, who first met Hong when they worked together on an episode of “Charmed” in 2001.
Attempts to get Hong his star had been unsuccessful until 2020, when Kim helped rally a public effort to push his application through and crowdfund the $55,000 fee. As not just an icon but an agent of change, the battles Hong and his peers fought to simply work, live and persevere as artists in the industry paved the way for the generations that followed, Kim said.
Still aglow days after the ceremony, Hong laughed at the notion of retirement and reflected on a question he’s often asked about his prolific and trailblazing career: How’d he do it?
“Obviously,” he said in the understatement of a lifetime, “it took a lot of work.”
Taking nary a break since the 1950s, he leaned on his natural instincts and genre-hopping versatility, worked with John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Chuck
Norris and Sammo Hung, left indelible impressions in “Chinatown,” “Wayne’s World 2” and “Airplane!” and lent his voice to animated films from “Mulan” to “Turning Red.”
More Hong projects are on the way, including the HBO Max animated series “Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.” He can be seen in theaters traversing the multiverse as the grumpy grandpa Gong Gong in A24’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” in a performance that upends expectations and makes use of the nonagenarian’s dynamic range.
Hong’s credits run the gamut across genres and generations, from “Flower Drum Song,” “The Sand Pebbles” and “Kung Fu” to “Tango & Cash,” “The West Wing,” “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory.” His long career as a character actor speaks to a skill for turning small parts into meatier roles with depth and wit and imbuing roles with main character energy, almost defiantly so.
He played replicant eye
designer Hannibal Chew in sci-fi classic “Blade Runner,” went toe-to-toe with Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown” and its sequel, “The Two Jakes” and comically stymied a starving Jerry, Elaine and George as the manager of a busy restaurant on an episode of “Seinfeld.”
But Hong’s most beloved role, filled with a delicious winking wickedness and surprising pathos, remains one of his most complex: the powerful sorcerer David Lo Pan of 1986 cult classic “Big Trouble in Little China.”
“All he wanted was a girl with green eyes,” said Hong of the humanity he found in his charismatic villain. “I don’t know about your dreams, but in my dreams, I’m lost — I’m still looking for something. I put that feeling into David Lo Pan. Seeking. Looking. I think you could see in the old man’s eyes that he was lonely. He was looking for something he couldn’t find in the universe, so he came down to Earth.”
After he wowed Groucho
Marx on air, Hong decided to transfer to the Univesity of Southern California to finish his studies. Soon he was booking several acting gigs a year while working as an engineer for Los Angeles County. But like other Asian American actors in Hollywood, Hong grew increasingly frustrated with the racist stereotypes and bit parts he had to navigate.
“Through those first two decades, I cannot remember roles for Asian Americans that had a lot of heart and a lot of feeling,” said Hong. “They were cardboard characters. They were cliched.” He lamented the colleagues who’d come before him who had no choice but to take demeaning or “gimmick” roles, or else not get work, such as Keye Luke, Benson Fong and Victor Sen Yung.
His fellow Asian American artists shared his frustrations. One day, he called future Oscar nominee Mako Iwamatsu and their friend, dancer Al Huang, to his apartment. “We said, ‘We have to do something,’ ” Hong recalled.
In 1965, Hong and Iwamatsu established the all-asian American theater troupe East West Players with seven other artists to give themselves the starring roles they were typically not cast in and to tell their own stories.
“They wanted to create opportunities for themselves as artists to play roles that they traditionally were not considered for, outside of the stereotypical roles that Asians are still cast in today,” said Snehal Desai, producing artistic director of EWP, now the oldest and largest Asian American theater company in the U.S.
“They empowered themselves when they felt like they weren’t getting the opportunities that they wanted or should,” said Desai. “We can’t speak enough of the outsized influence James has had on the Asian American community, particularly the Asian American artistic community.”
Watching “Everything Everywhere All at Once” co-star Ke Huy Quan as Waymond during filming filled Hong with pride and reminded him of his own Hollywood battles, after hearing that the former child actor left acting for two decades because of a lack of opportunities.
“I said, ‘This guy is really good! Why hasn’t he been doing movie roles forever before this?’ ” said Hong. “He should not have been hibernating for 20 years.”
“The ability to just act and perform, that is a born quality in Ke,” said Hong. “And I would say there probably is another 200 actors and actresses (with) that talent. But they’re not getting recognized because their industry still is not producing enough movies with roles — with good roles — for Asian American actors.”
Maybe that’s why, after fighting for so long for change, Hong is in no hurry to ease up. In addition to the “Gremlins” animated prequel, he’ll reprise his voice role as Mr. Ping for Netflix in “Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight” and appear on Disney+ series “American Born Chinese” alongside “Everything Everywhere All at Once” castmates Michelle Yeoh, Quan and Stephanie Hsu. Also upcoming is a fantasy feature directed by Zack Ward that Hong stars in, co-wrote and is producing, “Patsy Lee and the Keepers of the Five Kingdoms,” about a girl and her grandfather who are transported to a magical kingdom of the past.
Since Hong’s star ceremony, the calls have kept coming. “It’s busier than ever, it’s nonstop,” he marveled of the acting opportunities that have resurged for him in recent years, as roles have slowly gotten better and bigger in the industry he worked for decades to be seen by. “I like it that way.”