20 Things You Didn’t Know About Galaxy Quest
12. Fred Kwan Was Based On Caine In Kung Fu
Tony Shalhoub auditioned for Guy Fleegman, but was offered Fred Kwan. However, the part as it was in the script is nothing like what made it to the screen. Both he and the movie’s director Dean Parisot kept rewriting lines over and over, trying to make Fred more interesting:
“My part as written – we basically had to throw it all out because it didn't work with me in there. I mean, we couldn’t figure out how to make that work. So Dean said, “Look, we’ll invent a new character as we go along.”...It's a tribute to the other actors that they were open to us changing my lines every day. Usually, when you come to work, people want to know what's going to happen.”
Weirdly, Shalhoub was tapped to play Fred Kwan, who was playing ship’s engineer Chen. That’s a Lebanese-American playing a Chinese-American playing another Chinese-American. To pull it off, he vibed off another non-Asian actor in an Asian role, David Carradine’s Caine in the classic western action show Kung Fu. This directly informed their new take on the character, as Parisot explains:
“...the story goes - I don’t know if it’s true - that David Carradine was completely stoned all of the time on that show. Dialogue would just come out of his head and people would just stare at each other and think, “Where did that come from?” We knew we couldn’t do a stoner because we needed to hit a PG-13, but we basically suggested that.”