Star Trek actor John Cho makes history as the star of Searching, as a father desperate to find his teenage daughter.

He talks to Laura Harding about the representation of Asian-American actors in Hollywood.

If John Cho’s face looks familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen him in countless things before, but maybe you never clocked his name.

He plays Sulu in the rebooted Star Trek franchise, Harold in the Harold & Kumar movies and has popped up in dozens of TV shows including How I Met Your Mother, Ugly Betty and 30 Rock.

But now the actor, who was born in Korea but moved to Los Angeles as a child, is making history as the first Asian-American actor to headline a mainstream thriller.

He stars in Searching, as a father who becomes desperate when his teenage daughter vanishes and a police investigation into her disappearance leads nowhere.

In his attempt to find her, he turns to her laptop in the hope of tracing her digital footprints.

And for Cho, 46, a father himself to two young children, the subject matter felt particularly terrifying.

“I think all parents will agree with me, that you just walk around going, ‘What if something happened to my kid?’

“I always say that the day my wife got pregnant, I didn’t know it but a little ‘worry muscle’ was born that day.

“Sometimes it’s big, sometimes it’s little, but it’s always there and I haven’t even got to the teenage years where they’re driving yet.”

Cho said he was particularly drawn to the Searching role because it is a film about a family, and nothing was made of the fact they are Asian-American.

“Typically, the culture of an ethnic background is part of the plot, and we didn’t make it part of the plot at all.

“In a way this movie is from the future – a future where we are past all these firsts and it’s normalised and no one makes note of the fact this family happens to be all Asian. It’s ahead of its time in that way.”

Searching is being released in cinemas across the UK on August 31.