Has anything been more delightful over the last few years in Hollywood than the reemergence of Ke Huy Quan? The child star from The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is now an Academy Award-winning actor after spending nearly two decades away from acting. In addition to his acclaimed performance in the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, Quan joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the Disney+ series Loki as Ouroboros (aka OB), a genius-level technician of the Time Variance Authority. Quan spoke to Variety about his performance in the series and shared the advice he learned from series star Tom Hiddleston.
Quan admits that he found the extensive dialogue full of technical jargon in the series challenging, and turned to co-star Hiddleston for advice:
“In the beginning, I kept messing up my lines. My character is responsible for a lot of the exposition. So it would just be pages and pages of dialogue. I didn’t understand, what is the “temporal loom”? What is the “throughput multiplier”? I could barely say it in the beginning. I had to ask [executive producer] Kevin Wright: “You have to show me what it is.” I have to visualize it in my head in order for me to say this dialogue. So he showed me visuals. There was a miniature model of the temporal loom.
“I even asked Tom Hiddleston. In Episode 6, he was just spitting out that dialogue at 100 miles per hour. I was blown away by his performance. I said, ‘Tom, how do you do that?’ It comes so naturally for him. He talked about his method. He showed me how to do it. And of course, you know, I practiced it, and it worked.”
Hiddleston, who is used to reciting Shakespeare on stage, was able to give Quan some pointers. Quan continues:
I mean, there’s no secret to it. It’s really looking at the dialogue and reading it very, very slowly the first few times, and then as you become more comfortable with it, then you start picking it up. It’s just that repetition, but start very slow. I do the opposite. I jump right in and I’ll practice it as if I will be saying it in camera. But his process is just start very slow and familiarize yourself with every single word. That’s the method that I’ve been using ever since.
