Whenever North Korea makes the news, John Cho is overcome with sadness and by what he calls a sliding-doors effect — an eerie vision of a parallel life had his parents not escaped to the South.
“I mean, there but for the grace of God go I,” he said.
The Korean War, which erupted five years after the country was divided in 1945 — the United States supporting the South, and the Soviet Union the North — was rarely discussed in front of the young Cho, who at 6 emigrated with his family to America from Seoul.
But its shadow still looms, and he leapt at the offer to narrate “Korea: The Never-Ending War,” a two-hour chronicle of Korean Peninsula history airing April 29 on PBS.
“My life was very much changed and strangely continues to be shaped by this event,” he said. “It’s the defining experience of modern Koreans.”
“Korea” is the second part of a weirdly wonky Cho double-bill in the coming days: On Thursday, he’ll play a presidential campaign strategist in “The Wunderkind,” an episode of Jordan Peele’s revival of “The Twilight Zone” on CBS All Access.
In 2016, Cho — then best known as the stoner Harold Lee in the “Harold & Kumar” comedies and Hikaru Sulu in the “Star Trek” franchise — became the unwitting beneficiary of #StarringJohnCho, a social movement that imagined Cho standing in for, say, Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible” and Daniel Craig in “Spectre” as part of a wider calling for diversity in entertainment, and an Asian-American leading man.
Hollywood has responded. In 2018, he became the first Asian-American actor to head a mainstream thriller in “Searching” — with a performance that A.O. Scott of The Times deemed Oscar-caliber.
More recently, Cho was tagged to helm a motley crew of bounty hunters as Spike Spiegel in “Cowboy Bebop,” the coming Netflix live-action spin on the space Western animé in which he’ll flex some martial-arts skills.
In a phone interview fresh from a training session in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, actress and director Kerri Higuchi, and their two children, Cho, 46, spoke about coming to America and how Hollywood has surprised him.
Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What was it like for you to come to America as a child?
Any time I think about the Korean War, I end up thinking about raising children in chaos. The ensuing years were a time of great instability in Korea, and for me, it was a great trauma to move countries and not speak the language and be made fun of for the way I looked and talked. No sweat for my parents — it must have seemed like a step up for them. They were coming to the United States, the land of opportunity.
Does anything especially stand out?
I remember very vividly, when I was in first grade and very new to the United States, we were told that we would be participating in an activity called show-and-tell. And my father decided this would be a good time to educate these Houstonian children on Korean culture. So he made a little book with a map and pictures, like a little photo album, and sent it off with me. He didn’t realize people brought in their teddy bears, and I was deeply, deeply embarrassed, but what could I do? My teacher was so excited that she saw a teaching opportunity, and I remember the map going down. (Laughs) I guess maybe, if you’re my therapist here, this is full-circle coming to terms with that early childhood trauma, and really I’m doing that show-and-tell all these years later.
You kind of have a political theme going, with a “Twilight Zone” episode that feels ominously prescient.
I was worried about that idea. You know, drawing parallels to this president is tricky and I didn’t want it to come off as a critique. I think it should come off as a thought exercise.
Were you perhaps also worried about going to dark places with Jordan after seeing “Us”?
I haven’t seen “Us” yet but “Key & Peele,” I was just like, These guys are geniuses. I don’t want to necessarily compare myself to Jordan Peele. It’s just that “Harold & Kumar” also talked about race in the context of a stoner comedy. And I was like, Oh my god, these guys are doing it so much better than I could have ever imagined. And then he did “Get Out,” talking about race within the framework of a horror movie, and I just thought that was the most difficult Greg Louganis dive I have ever seen in cinema.
Do you think #StarringJohnCho ultimately bumped up your career?
Sure, although I think it’s less about my career. Whatever that discussion that people were having, I think it’s had a broad impact. And to be honest, I was skeptical. The pace of change has been so glacial. I was just thinking about this today, like when I came to LA in the late ’90s it must have been less than 15 years since “Sixteen Candles” and Long Duk Dong. So when I arrived in town, I didn’t have lofty dreams at all. I just wanted to work. And I was always throwing cold water on people’s enthusiasm in the diversity realm. I just didn’t think as it related to Asians that it would get much better.
And has it?
I have been pleasantly surprised at what I could only assume is generational change and people’s attitudes about diversity, and about Asian people in particular. Going back to #StarringJohnCho, it’s hard to measure the impact. But I look around and see so many more actors of Asian descent who are earning a living, and that’s really the goal anyway. I’m sure to some extent #StarringJohnCho is a result of attitudes that were already shifting rather than changing minds on its own. But I’m grateful. I literally never thought I’d see the day.
Your “Cowboy Bebop” announcement pretty much broke the internet.
It’s really blown my mind to realize that there’s so many fans of it out there because it’s just one of these things that for some reason I had never crossed paths with.
Are you mastering Jeet Kune Do for the role?
I’m trying to get in shape for this — that’s where I was this morning. I want a functional martial arts body. I want my legs to really do those things. I’ve only done this in earnest once before, for “Star Trek,” and I found the discipline of learning a martial art great for the character.
Speaking of “Star Trek,” IMDB lists a coming sequel, with you returning as Sulu.
I heard rumblings and then it was off, but man, I’d love to do another one. I’m just really proud to be in “Star Trek” because it was the best thing American pop culture has ever made.
Any plans for a fourth “Harold & Kumar” movie?
Me and the guys were talking about the possibility of that just in the abstract, and it’s really like, How do we do that in this administration? What’s our angle? And we don’t know. I think the degree of difficulty is higher because we don’t like taking sides. “Harold & Kumar,” those movies are essentially optimistic, and the mood seems right now to be pessimistic, and I don’t know how to resolve those things.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.