The one role out of more than 500 that’s stuck with James Hong

polygon.com:

In the multiverse-spanning sci-fi action wonder Everything Everywhere All At Once, 93-year-old James Hong plays Gong Gong, the stern father of protagonist Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh). She’s been trying to please him her entire life, apparently with little success, and his disapproval has been one of the defining pressures that shaped her many possible timelines. Over his nearly 70 years of acting experience, Hong has taken on hundreds of roles, and has become one of the world’s most recognizable character actors. But he says one of those roles stands out above all the rest for him, and Gong Gong brought back memories of playing that part.

“It’s no trouble for me to go from the benign grandpa to the villain, who is somewhat a version of Lo Pan,” Hong tells Polygon. “I always recall upon Big Trouble in Little China and Lo Pan. It was a great thing for me to be in that movie with John Carpenter and accomplish what I did. That character, of course, replays in my mind, and the creation [of him] jumped into other characters. There is almost always a facet of Lo Pan in other characters I play.”

On a surface level, the elderly grandfather Gong Gong doesn’t seem to share much with the evil demon-controlling sorcerer Hong played in 1986’s Big Trouble in Little China. But both films gave Hong dual roles: Just as Gong Gong manifests differently in different universes, Lo Pan manifests in different settings and moments as an all-powerful malevolent conjurer and a seemingly frail, harmless old man.

It’s an understatement to say Hong has played a wide variety of roles in his decades-spanning career. Chances are, you’ve seen him in something, possibly without realizing it was him. His first roles were nameless background characters, but