MEET KUMAR CHAMELEON
Cho goes from light ‘Harold’ to scary ‘Grudge’
John Cho has traversed outer space and escaped Guantanamo Bay, but demonic forces weren’t in the cards for his big-screen ventures.
“The first movie I ever saw in a theater was ‘Death Ship 2,’ which was an absolute slasher fest,” the 47year-old “Star Trek” and “Harold & Kumar” star told the Daily News. “I was 6 years old and we had just moved to the United States from Korea.”
The film left such an impression on Cho, that he’s stayed away from horror flicks on the big screen during his more than 20 years in Hollywood. Until now.
Cho’s next film, “The Grudge,” is a reboot of the 2004 film series that starred Sarah Michelle Gellar as a woman contending with a supernatural curse that kills.
Cho said that his version of the film is more akin to the original Japanese “JuOn” franchise that inspired the Gellar series.
“I like injecting a face that looks like mine into a genre that has been pretty white, for the most part,” Cho told The News of horror films. “And this cast is pretty diverse. So in general that was a driver for me to take this film.”
Best known for playing stoner nerd Harold Lee in the “Harold & Kumar” trilogy, Cho notes this is a very different world than the one in 2004, when the first film, “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” debuted. In the years since there have been two more comedies, 2008’s “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay” and 2011’s “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.”
“I don’t know how Harold and Kumar would fare in 2019,” Cho told The News. “They’re … politically down the middle, I’d say, and the middle is not a place to be today.”
“I feel like those characters, in the movie, have always balked at politics in general and I’m not sure how we navigate the humor and where the humor wants to go and sort of play down the middle, which sounds like we’re tapping out, but it’s not,” said the “Searching” actor.
In the months before Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Cho had an idea for a fourth film.
“I think I had pitched the writers at the time almost a ‘Freaky Friday’ kind of a body-switch premise that involved Harold essentially becoming Kumar and Kumar becoming a Harold later in life,” Cho revealed.
Over three years later though, the pieces don’t seem to be coming together.
“I don’t even know how possible it would be to finance a movie like that today,” he volunteered. “An idea like ‘Harold and Kumar’ … in 2019, wants to go to TV probably.”
The idea of the film going to Netflix, Cho says, is “something … I personally would not be down for.”
“I like keeping those as films, as features,” he told The News.
“The Grudge” will start haunting theaters Jan. 3