Ke Huy Quan becomes first Asian male to win Screen Actors Guild Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’
Everything Everywhere All at Once star Ke Huy Quan has become the first Asian man to receive the Screen Actors Guild Award for ‘Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role’.
The actor has been racking up the award nominations and critical acclaim for his role as Waymond Wang, the optimistic husband of Michelle Yeoh’s nihilistic Evelyn Quan Wang. Quan is the second Asian actor to win a SAG award in media, following Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae, who won for ‘Male Actor in a Drama Series’.
Quan learned the historical aspect of his win during his acceptance speech. “This moment no longer belongs to just me, it also belongs to everyone who has asked for change,” the Vietnamese actor shared, as reported by Variety. “When I stepped away from acting it was because there were so few opportunities.”
Looking to his co-stars and fellow nominees, he added: “The landscape looks so different now than before. So thank you so much to everyone in this room who contributed to these changes.”
The Goonies and Indiana Jones star also won the Golden Globe Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture’ for his role and has been nominated for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ at the 95th Oscars, due to air March 13th.
If Quan wins the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, he will be the second Asian winner ever in supporting actor, following Haing S. Ngor for The Killing Fields in 1984. In the Academy Awards’ 95-year-long history, only five Asian actors have received an Oscar, including Ben Kingsley for Gandhi and F. Murray Abraham Amadeus for ‘Best Actor’. Ngor, Sayonara’s Miyoshi Umeki and Minari’s Yuh-Jung Youn have won ‘Best Supporting Actress’.
The actor’s co-star Yeoh also made history by becoming the first Asian woman nominated for ‘Best Actress in a Leading Role’ at the Oscars.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a sci-fi comedy drama directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and stars Yeoh, Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Stephanie Hsu, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr. and James Hong.
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