Celebrities
Ke Huy Quan lost health insurance after filming ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’
The 51-year-old actor lost his health insurance after no further offers came his way.
‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ was filmed between January and March of 2020, however, its theatrical release was postponed until March 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, Quan, who played Waymond Wang, wasn’t receiving any further acting offers and, as a result, lost his health insurance.
The sci-fi-adventure film marks Quan’s return to acting, but he was, of course, unable to audition for anything else due to social distancing. This placed his acting comeback in jeopardy.
The issue with the health insurance
Quan told The Late Late Show: “I was about to lose my health insurance. So, I called my agent and I said, ‘Can you please get me anything? It doesn’t matter, I just need one job to make the minimum requirement so I can qualify for health insurance the following year.’
“And I could not get one single job. Sure enough, 2021 came and went [and I] lost my health insurance.”
Everything depended on the film’s success
Afterwards, Quan realized that both his career and livelihood depended on the success of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’.
Quan explained how he called the producer in a panic because “nobody wants to hire me.”
“[The producer said], ‘Ke, just be patient. You just wait,’” Quan said. “The movie came out in March of last year and my life has been changed.”
Luckily, the film has done extremely well, raking in several awards and nominations. Quan, himself, has earned a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award and many more alongside an Academy Award nomination.
Quan is slated to appear in more productions like ‘Loki’ season 2.
An epic comeback
Originally getting his start as a child actor, Quan starred as Short Round in ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ and Richard “Data” Wang in ‘The Goonies’. Unfortunately, Quan struggled to get roles after this and quit acting all together to work behind the scenes in film productions.
Quan told Variety that it was the success of ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ that encouraged his return to acting.
“When ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ came out and I saw my fellow Asian actors up on the screen, I wanted to be up there with them,” Quan said. “I called up an agent friend of mine, and I asked him if he wanted to represent me, and he said yes.
“Two weeks later, I got a call about this movie that stars Michelle Yeoh, written and directed by the Daniels [Kwan and Scheinert] and Waymond was one of the leads.”