Ke Huy Quan says discovering a nearly $100,000 Lucasfilm residuals check altered his family's circumstances and reshaped how he viewed his earliest success. In Never Say Die, his new memoir that hit bookstands on Tuesday, Quan recounts being 12 when he landed the role of Short Round in Steven Spielberg's 1984 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and how a single envelope at his parents' kitchen table startled him and his family.
He describes his mother holding an envelope with his name and his father holding the papers that had been inside, then reading the amount on the check. Quan writes he “didn’t understand how more money could suddenly appear” after already receiving pay for the film. Once he grasped what residuals meant, he called the clause “a quiet gesture from Steven and George [Lucas].”
Quan places that gesture in context, noting that profit participation for actors was rare at the time. He writes, “Back then, almost no actors got a piece of a movie’s profits,” and adds that even in the present day, only the biggest stars commonly share in a film's returns. For a child actor on his first movie to receive such a payment, he says, was nearly unheard of, and because Temple of Doom followed the massive success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the sequel’s financial prospects made the award especially meaningful.
Beyond the principle of profit sharing, Quan stresses the practical effect. He calls the payout a “small share” that nevertheless was life-changing for his family. The anecdote is threaded through the memoir as part of a larger reflection on childhood fame and the uncertainty that followed it. Quan has also publicly acknowledged Spielberg's role in launching his career, thanking the director during his 2023 Golden Globes acceptance for Everything Everywhere All at Once, and writing in the book that as he matured he feared his early success might be all he would ever achieve.
The memoir collects these memories and assessments, using the Texas-sized check as a focal point for how industry decisions can have long-term personal impact. Never Say Die reached bookstores on Tuesday, and the recollection of that first residuals check stands as a central episode in Quan's recounting of his early career and its aftereffects.
