While Ke Huy Quan has relaunched his acting career in recent years with movies and TV shows like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Loki and Zootopia 2, many still know him best for playing Short Round in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Alas, that was the only time we saw Indy hanging out the child sidekick, but it thankfully wasn’t the last time Quan and Harrison Ford ran into each other. The two had a heartwarming reunion at D23 in 2022, and Quan admitted that even he was surprised by how it went down.
The fan account @indianajonesnews shared Ke Huy Quan’s account of how this encounter happened, which he spoke about around the time that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was coming out. While some of these celebrity reunions are planned ahead of time, Quan and Harrison Ford’s happened purely because of serendipitous timing, as you’ll read in the post below:
Harrison Ford was at that year’s D23 to present footage of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, while Ke Huy Quan was there because it was announced he would be part of the Loki Season 2 cast. As the younger actor pointed out, he hadn’t seen his Indiana Jones co-star since he was a kid, so there was no guarantee that Ford was going to recognize him after 38 years. Plus, the Han Solo actor has a reputation for being grumpy, though sometimes he plays into that for comedic effect.
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In any case, Ford fortunately recognized Quan immediately, and they were all smiles when the photo of them together was taken. As if that wasn’t uplifting enough, these two have had a few more run-ins since then. Ford presented the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 2023 Oscars, so when Everything Everywhere All at Once won, he briefly got to interact on stage with Quan, who’d also won Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Waymond Wang earlier in the night. Then, at the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny world premiere in June of the same year, Quan surprised Ford during an interview on the red carpet.
I’m glad that Harrison Ford and Ke Huy Quan have gotten these moments together out in public, and I look forward to the next time they’re photographed or recorded crossing paths. That said, reading Quan’s account about what happened in 2022 makes me sad that we never saw more of Indiana Jones and Short Round together onscreen. It would have been cool if the latter appeared during Dial of Destiny, like John Rhys-Davies’ Sallah and Karen Allen’s Marion did, so we could learn what happened to him after the events of The Temple of Doom.
Alas, that time has passed now that Harrison Ford’s done playing Indiana Jones, but maybe there’ll another opportunity for him and Quan to act together in a different kind of project. For now, Ford can currently be seen playing Dr. Paul Rhoades in the Apple TV subscription-exclusive series Shrinking. Quan has been cast in an undisclosed role for The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender, which will now be available to watch with a Paramount+ subscription sometime later this year.