John Cho reacts to complaints that, at age 49, he is too old to play the 27-year-old Spike Spiegel in Cowboy Bebop

Vulture

In a wide-ranging interview with Vulture, Cho also discussed preparing for the physically demanding role, breaking his ACL and whether race had anything to do with his casting. "The biggest fear that I had was I was too old," Cho said when asked about playing a character who is 27 in the anime. "I knew people were gonna have issues with my age. And I had to get over it. I’m not a person who says age is just a number or whatever. It was gonna be harder — physically. And I was gonna look different than a 25-year-old guy. At some point, the opportunity is 'Yes or no — do you wanna do it?' And I did wanna do it. So I wasn’t gonna stop myself from doing it." Cho said the experience training for Cowboy Bebop changed his perception of physical actors. "It was actually a cool lesson," he said. "As a nonathletic person, I was kind of a dick the other way. I didn’t give that kind of acting enough credit. I was a … nerd snob. For this role, everything came from training; my character decisions came from that. Training is also a more accurate parallel to how to get a good performance." As for breaking his ACL, Cho said "for some reason Netflix originally didn’t want to publicize what happened...It was real wonky. We had been shooting all night, and I was doing kind of an athletic move as the sun was coming up. It was probably a lack of sleep. Just a little move and (I was down). So that was a low moment. It was 5:30 Saturday morning when I arrived at the emergency room and it was filled with people who had gotten super drunk on Friday night and then got in a fight or fell and cracked their heads open. Ironically a sobering experience. Then you have your surgery and you go into rehab. I’m at home doing these knee exercises, and coming off the drugs, I was thinking about Cowboy Bebop. Doing those knee exercises, I was like, I gotta put my focus into this. So I think that’s also fueling my fear. (Laughs)." Asked whether race played a part in his casting, Cho said: "I’ve been curious and I should’ve asked. I never really did. I’m pretty sure that they had made a decision that this character should be Asian. Having said that, I’m not sure whether the Japanese creators of the show cared. Because when I look at anime, there’s not really an answer to the question of what this person’s race is. And I think that partially has to do with the genre; it’s its own thing, and it’s not necessarily reflective of the planet Earth that you and I inhabit. However, we live on planet Earth and we’re making a product for people in 2021. And so if I were a viewer and saw that a white man was cast as Spike Spiegel, maybe I would say, ah, there they go again. I’m not sure if that’s fair."