Anna Luo

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once is the latest release from indie film studio A24, making waves for the Asian American community. In a mere 140 minutes, the film profoundly explores the immigrant experience in America, a fraught mother-daughter relationship, parallel universes, and the crushing weight of sentience.

But the film’s silent win comes in the form of Waymond Wang, portrayed by Ke Huy Quan. As the husband of Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn, Quan’s comedic and loving characterisation subtly counters and subverts emasculating stereotypes of Asian men. Waymond Wang is a middle-aged Asian male character whose kindness, authenticity and silliness are strengths. Because of this, he is the film’s hero.

Ke Huy Quan is the perfect actor to portray Waymond in many ways. Up to his casting in this film, Quan’s career was representative of the many challenges faced by Asian actors in Hollywood. In 2021, a study from University of Southern California found that less than 6 percent of speaking roles and 4 percent of lead and co-lead roles went to Asian actors in Hollywood films.

Despite appearing as a child star in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and The Goonies (1985), Quan faced a lack of acting opportunities in his adult life. “It was really tough for an Asian actor to work at that time, because those opportunities came very few and far in between,” Quan told Looper, “Honestly, I spent a lot of time waiting for the phone to ring and it barely did, and when it did, it was mostly for a character that had a couple of lines, or didn’t even have a character name.”

Quan subsequently retired from acting, and began working behind the scenes as a fight choreographer and assistant director for Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. When Quan finally began auditioning for roles again as an actor after more than twenty years, he recalled the first time he read the script for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. “I laughed so hard and I cried so hard,” he said in a podcast interview with Feeling Asian, becoming tearful as he recounted the experience, “It was a script I wanted to read for so long.”

His return to the screen as Waymond adds a redemptive element to his character, and is hopefully indicative of a new era of film that offers more robust characters and richer representation for Asian Americans.

While Henry Golding’s role as a romantic lead in Crazy Rich Asians and Simu Liu’s role as the first Asian Marvel superhero in Shang Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings certainly platformed discussions on lead-role representation for Asian men, these roles also defer to a conventional standard of masculinity. Quan’s Waymond is an exciting example of characters that expand the breadth of male representation on screen, adding to the likes of Steven Yeun in Minari (2020) and Tzi Ma in Tigertail (2020).

In his interview with Feeling Asian, Quan acknowledged the barriers that Asian male leads like Golding and Liu broke and also remarked on the importance of other kinds of male leads.

“[This film] changed how we look at the leading man in film. Waymond is not your typical leading man,” he said, “We’ve been so used to what masculinity looks like for a long time, and it’s alway measured by how big your biceps are or how much weight you can lift. But there should be a variety, the definition of masculinity should be expanded. It should include how big your heart is, how much love and respect and empathy you give to one another. That’s also very masculine to me.”

At the beginning of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, the scene focuses solely on Evelyn, played by the legendary Michelle Yeoh. Everything revolves around her – she is responsible for making sure her father is comfortable while visiting from China, keeping the family’s laundromat business afloat, and putting paperwork together for an IRS audit. On top of this mounting pressure, her daughter persists on introducing her girlfriend to her Gong Gong (Evelyn’s father), which Evelyn does not think is a good idea due to her homophobic prejudices.

In comparison, Waymond is shown to have very few responsibilities. He banters with customers and puts googly eyes on inanimate objects around the house. With the IRS audit meeting looming, Evelyn is seen frantically trying to put paperwork together while Waymond focuses on making cookies for the auditor, much to her dismay.

In one scene, Evelyn quips to her daughter, exasperated, “Sometimes I don’t know what your father would do without me!” In many ways, Evelyn’s critical view of her husband mirrors Western stereotypes of Asian men – Waymond’s goofiness and lightheartedness are equated with weakness and incapability.

This interpretation of Waymond is sadly reminiscent of other problematic onscreen representations of Asian male characters, such as Mr. Chow from The Hangover, or Gedde Watanabe in Sixteen Candles. In their respective films, these characters either serve a one-dimensional purpose of being an ineffectual sidekick to their protagonist or as a punchline to racist, unfunny jokes. Even in the beginning of the film, Waymond’s attempt to seek a divorce is met with indignation from Evelyn, and their marital discord plays into emasculating stereotypes.

This view of Waymond quickly dissipates as the film's central conflict is introduced. Evelyn enters a world of parallel universes that she can travel through and experience alternate versions of herself. Waymond appears as alternate versions of himself as well - his first alternate being ‘Alpha Waymond’, a calm, cool, and collected badass who wields a fanny pack as a weapon.

Instead of portraying these versions of Waymond as vastly different from the original, the film employs these alternate representations to explore the depth of Waymond’s character.

In one of the universes, Waymond is a quiet but successful businessman. He meets an alternate Evelyn who is a successful martial arts movie star. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, this version of Waymond confesses to Evelyn that maintaining his softness and kindness is his way of fighting against the harshest aspects of reality.

“You think because I’m kind it means I’m naive, and maybe I am,” he tells movie-star Evelyn, “It’s strategic and necessary. This is how I fight.” ‘Everything Waymond’ does comes from a place of genuine love and care, and it is only Evelyn who has refused to accept it. This confession proves to her that Waymond is the opposite of weak, and she learns from his example to resolve the plot’s biggest conflicts.

Evelyn’s experience with alternate versions of her life, as well as alternate versions of her father, daughter, and husband, slowly converge to reveal that her relationships with herself and the people she loves are precious and worth fixing. Throughout the film, Waymond acts as the guide who helps her come to this conclusion. His alternate versions believe in her and reaffirm her self worth and this consistency comes full circle once the audience and Evelyn realises that he has done this from the very beginning.

This reversal of perspective goes leaps and bounds to portray an Asian male character that can be both kind and badass. Waymond is a provider for his family, and all of his multiverse behaviour remains consistent with the character we are introduced to at the beginning of the film.

By refusing to have Waymond undergo any kind of transformation to fulfil a more ‘masculine' archetype, the film pushes the boundaries of the narrow and limiting social construction of masculinity. The film celebrates Waymond’s earnestness in defiance of emasculating stereotypes about Asian men in Western culture.

“If we were to expand the parameter of what it means to be masculine,” Quan remarked in his interview with Feeling Asian, “Then we open up a lot of opportunities for a lot of people.”

Through reinforcing Waymond’s character as a protagonist and hero, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once offers a deeper reflection on what it means to be a man and father. Waymond represents a form of masculinity that thoughtfully refutes hegemonic constructions of masculinity as strength, control, and alpha-male dominance.

What ‘Everything, Everywhere, All At Once’ teaches us about masculinity