For those of us who grew up watching Dustin Nguyen on “21 Jump Street,” seeing him back on our TV screens in recent years — most recently on Apple TV+’s “Dope Thief” — has been akin to reconnecting with an old friend. So where has Nguyen been, and how did he make his way back to Hollywood?
Turns out Nguyen had been building a busy and successful film career in Vietnam, where he had born but left as a teen (with his family in 1975 after the fall of Saigon). He first returned to the country to shoot the 2007 Vietnamese language film “The Rebel”— which became a huge blockbuster there.
“People were saying, ‘hey, you should come back here and be a part of this renaissance with the movie industry,” Nguyen recalls. “I made a decision to just move and hope for the best. I opened a production company there, and I started directing and producing and telling stories that I really wanted to do, and never looked back.”
That even included hosting and producing a local version of my favorite reality show, “The Amazing Race,” which he admits now was quite a rough learning experience.
“It is a brutal show to produce in terms of logistics, and to do it with the Vietnamese budget, which was probably a tenth of what they would do in the US and Australia,” he says. “We didn’t have enough manpower, so I ended up running back and forth as a director. And then you throw in the host obligation. It was brutal. You sleep for two hours, and you’ve got to be the first to get up to inspect the first site that the contestants will start from. That was 30 days straight. Looking back, I think I probably lost five biological years.”
OK, perhaps that wasn’t for him. But still, he was making a good life for himself in Vietnam when a chance email from an old “21 Jump Street” colleague got him back on Hollywood’s radar. In 2018, Steve Beers, who worked as a producer on “21 Jump Street,” was an exec producer on “This Is Us,” and had been considering shooting some episodes in Vietnam.
“I’d been in Vietnam so long I had bever even heard of the show,” Nguyen says. “I said, ‘Steve, come over, I’ll show you around. We can handle the production service for you.’ He offered me a couple of guest spots on those episodes, and I ended up doing one, because that particular one was shooting in Vietnam. It was a very small part, but I started getting emails from friends. Even one of my favorite casting directors, April Webster, reached out to my agent. ‘My God, I just saw Dustin on “This is Us,” and I was wondering where the hell he’s been and what he’s been doing!’”
Around the same time, his pal Justin Lin also reached out. “I had done a movie for him as an actor some years back, and he was like, ‘man, what are you doing in Vietnam?’ I told him I was making movies here and living here. He asked to see these films. And so occasionally I’d send him films I was doing and we kept in touch. So, he called me one day out of the blue and said, ‘I’m doing this project “Warrior,” and I want you to be a part of it.’”
Nguyen was wrapping up directing a movie in Vietnam, but made it to the “Warrior” set in time to appear toward the end of Season 1. Eventually, Nguyen was offered the chance to also direct episodes of “Warrior,” and that led to his full-time move back to the United States.
“It just all kind of fell together,” he says. “I was worried because I’ve been away for so long, and there might be an ‘out of sight/out of mind’ kind of thing. So I had to kind of get reacquainted with the industry, or let the industry get reacquainted with me.”
From there he starred in the Netflix film “Blade of the 47 Ronin” and the crime drama film “The Accidental Getaway Driver,” which premiered at Sundance in 2023. Then came “Dope Thief.”
“It’s been a great decision to move back, and life just has a funny way of steering you in certain directions,” says Nguyen, who is now based in Hawai’i. “’Accidental Getaway Driver’ and ‘Dope Thief’ are two of the best things that have come my way in the 30-plus years I’ve been as an actor. I’m so proud to be involved in those two projects.”
In the case of “Dope Thief,” Nguyen recurs as Son Pham, a drug trafficker that was pitched to him as “a Vietnamese Tony Soprano.”
“I’ve never seen Vietnamese American male characters portrayed like this on screen,” he says. “When we did the deal I was supposed to die in Episode 6, and then as I was shooting, [exec producer] Peter Craig kept writing more and more stuff. Then I found out I was in Episode 7.” Should there be a Season 2, Nguyen says Craig has hinted that his character, Son Pham, might be seen on the run with the cartel.
For Nguyen, it’s also been a bit incredible to hear from younger performers and artisans who say his visibility — as one of the very few Asian Americans on TV in the 1980s — helped their decision to get into the business.
“’Jump Street,’ that was the jackpot for me, in terms of having a character like that,” he says. “Back then, it was really difficult to find parts for Asian Americans… Some actors on ‘Warrior’ came up to me on my first day on the set, and told me how inspired they were seeing me on ‘21 Jump Street.’ That just meant a lot to me.” Glad to see Nguyen getting his due.
