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Comment by dayofthedaleks | Hacker News Reader

Probably what makes this most relevant to HN is that the film marks a triumphant return to acting for Ke Huy Quan, who we all know as Data from The Goonies and Short Round in Temple of Doom.

It's a performance that shows surprising range and leverages his later career work as a stunt choreographer. I get the sense he was happy enough with his path after film school, but we've clearly been missing out on good stuff from him.

In a recent NYTimes interview he talked about work drying up after child roles, something to the effect of 'I got a single audition for a Viet Cong part, and I didn't even get that.'

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I'm not saying this applies to him (we weren't in those audition rooms), but a lot of child actors dramatically lose acting skills as they get older. There is something in child acting that makes their lines believable with relatively little effort, which then disappears with age. Grown-up actors have to work harder to achieve believability, and some child actors never manage to. Casting directors will inevitably count this sort of phenomenon against ex-child actors. Maybe without those bumps in the road, he would not have put enough effort in the craft to actually reach this quality.

> Maybe without those bumps in the road, he would not have put enough effort in the craft to actually reach this quality.

I thought you said you weren't saying this applies to him? This sentence seems like a non-sequitur then.

I take your point about child actors losing acting skills, but why project that on him? We don't know if that was the cause in his case.

My point is that he doesn't know either. He complains that work dried up, but that might have been for a reason - maybe it's that casting directors have qualms about ex-child actors, maybe it's that those qualms were justified. The parent comment makes it sound like he was always good enough, and my comment is that we can't really know.

Casting directors get a lot of flack all the time, because they have some real power, but they are professionals doing a job (and often they are not even the problem, as directors and producers also have a big say on any major role).

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