John Cho stars in a film about a universal fear: Protecting family as smart home devices get too smart
Veteran actor John Cho says his new AI thriller, “Afraid,” about a smart home device that becomes too involved in his family, parallels concerns around technology that he’s had in his own life.
Cho’s film opens Friday and focuses on a digital assistant device that spirals out of control after gathering increasing information on the family it’s meant to help. He said the way the film questions the use of artificial intelligence and overreliance on technology reflects some of the issues with the internet that he’s observed as a parent.
“My son, for instance, plays online games. And I’m not 100% sure who’s online with him all the time,’” he said. “It could theoretically be someone who’s not his age, who’s pretending to be his age. … Is this better or worse or equal to real life?”
In the film, Cho plays patriarch Curtis, whose family is selected to test out the digital assistant, called “AIA.” After the unit is installed throughout their home, complete with cameras and sensors, the family meets AIA with enthusiasm. It seemingly makes life far more convenient, from ordering lunches to putting the kids to bed. But as AIA progressively collects more information about the family, like their individual behaviors and their darkest secrets, it becomes dangerously protective over their lives.
Cho was apprehensive about taking on horror roles in his early days, he said, largely due to growing up in a religious household where it felt “wrong” to watch the genre. But he said he’s been increasingly interested in the way in which horror can help him work through his own personal questions and doubts, with the latest being the limits of technology. He also talked about how films without overt Asian-specific identity issues are an evolved and important part of representation. Cho said that not only have roles gotten more substantive for actors of color, but nowadays, he’s no longer the token Asian actor on a set. Several of his co-stars in the latest project, in fact, are of Asian descent, including Havana Rose Liu and Lukita Maxwell.
“It’s really awesome to meet, in particular for me, Asian American actors on set and work with them, because that was not something that was typical for me,” he said. “Early on … I was never working with Asian American actors. We would all be in our own projects. We would all be the one Asian American on our own project and we would never work together.”
The movie is the latest in Cho’s diverse body of work, which includes comedy like the stoner cult-classic franchise “Harold and Kumar” and science fiction like the “Star Trek” reboot film series. It’s a career that’s spanned more than three decades, and in that time, Cho said, the atmosphere for artists of color has improved, now providing more chances for actors to sustain a career. “It’s a completely different approach as an actor, if you think, ‘This could be my only job ever.’ That’s what the early years were like,” Cho recalled. “Like, ‘I’ll do this. I’ll be the waiter in this scene, and maybe I’ll never — because of the way the town is structured — it’s possible I won’t work again. These are the limits.’ So it feels a little more expansive.”
Though, the industry is still far from perfect, Cho said. He pointed out that Hollywood should evolve to expand the definition of “Asian American film,” citing 2022 psychedelic comedy drama “Everything Everywhere All at Once” as an example of a “new note in the melody of our history.”
“Sometimes when we say ‘Asian American film,’ it’s a certain kind of theme — whatever we think of as ‘Asian problems,’ which are typically intergenerational problems,” Cho said. “But a science fiction movie would be an Asian American film to me, provided an Asian American actor is in it, or wrote it, or whatever. I want that.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
