![]() When I watched it, it became meaningful to me.” And he said, ‘Okay, what role?’ I said, ‘Spike Spiegel.’ He said, ‘Holy shit, you have to fucking do it.’ That was my entry, and starting to understand how meaningful it was to people. “When I said I got an offer to do Cowboy Bebop, there was a pregnant pause. A phone call to filmmaker Aneesh Chaganty, who worked with Cho on the acclaimed 2018 thriller Searching, indicated to him the gravity of the project. “ completely missed me,” Cho says, revealing he only heard about it when the opportunity to play Spike was within reach. One could argue it was worth it for Cho to miss Cowboy Bebop on cable. Phillip Faraone/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images ![]() John Cho, at the November 11 premiere of Cowboy Bebop in Los Angeles. In 2014, Cho starred in the short-lived cult comedy Selfie, the first American TV series to star an Asian male as the romantic lead. ![]() His now multifaceted resume encompasses everything from the raunchy Harold & Kumar films and escapist Star Trek trilogy to dramas like Better Luck Tomorrow and Columbus. When the anime began its original English-dubbed broadcast run on Adult Swim in 2001, he was just embarking on his career. Cowboy Bebop takes place in the future, where Earth is abandoned by humans who terraform the rest of the solar system, creating a new frontier for outlaws to run – and gun-for-hires called “cowboys” like Spike to catch them.įor Cho, starring in Cowboy Bebop is not quite a boyhood dream come true. The show stars Cho in the lead role of Spike Spiegel, a cool blue bounty hunter with a haunted past. On November 19, Netflix released its live-action adaptation of Shinichiro Watanabe’s beloved anime. “It was speaking to the heart of the scene and not what you were watching. “It was in contrast to this propulsive visual,” Cho raves to Inverse. It was in this moment, the climax to the first episode of the cult anime series Cowboy Bebop, that 49-year-old actor John Cho felt himself drawn by its gravitational pull. Two sleek spaceships whose silhouettes resemble darts with wings rip through the skies, and then outer space, while a melancholy saxophone solo straight from a noir film sets the mood. An asteroid colony that looks and feels like Tijuana, Mexico. A beautiful woman on the run with nowhere to go. The crowd at Town Hall ecstatically screamed their excitement and sat back down in their seats from their standing ovation.A drug deal gone wrong. Listening to that score told me, “I did it, and you can, too.”Īt the end of the night, conductor Macy Schmidt proposed playing “the greatest theme song in history” one last time. I was discovering that, more than many of my peers, I was having to create my own performance opportunities (gender wasn’t the only reason for this-my playing style was also getting more experimental, largely as a revolt against being dismissed as the “cute little guitar player”). It was the piece of music I loved most, and “even though” it was written by a woman, thousands and thousands of people loved it, too. It’s also why, as a college junior fighting my way to class during Midwest winters, Yoko Kanno’s score to Cowboy Bebop became a balm. That’s why keeping an eye on programming is so important. If, especially as a child, you see someone who shares a key characteristic with you doing something exception, you think, “Wow, maybe I can do that one day, too.” Maybe I’ve watched too many anime, but that spark of inspiration can have a huge domino effect. The power of example truly can’t be overstated. But sometimes the quiet sexism-like simply not booking the equally talented female horn player-is the hardest to confront. These perceptions are getting better, especially after me too burst the conversation wide open. Jazz is a very male-coded genre-when I was going to jam sessions around 2011, people usually assumed I was either a singer or, if they saw the guitar on my back, someone’s diligent girlfriend. In my lived yet unacademic opinion, the idea of “missing women” in an arts scene largely comes down to whether or not a space welcomes them, in both an institutional sense and a “vibe check of the room” sense. It’s a conundrum for the ages, one that gets hot takes galore. Is the kind of music I’m playing (rock, jazz) too male-coded? Is it this city’s scene? Is it me? You begin to wonder why this keeps happening. ![]() It’s a bizarre feeling, to be in a group of about a dozen people presenting something where you alone are the onstage representative for about 50% of the earth’s population-again and again. I, too, am a musician-and often in circles that I’ll call “jazz and jazz adjacent.” The percentage of shows where I have thought to myself, “Ah, I’m the only non-male on the bill,” is well over half.
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