At this stage inJohn Cho’s life and career, fatherhood is coming to the fore.

“It is really difficult to keep your worldview作为家长,你做的任何事都,”行为or and father of two told The Chronicle during a recent video interview from a hotel in Los Angeles. “It is a permanent alteration of how you think and how you regard the world.”

For his latest role in the father-daughter road-trip dramedy “Don’t Make Me Go,” Cho, a UC Berkeley alum, tapped deeply into his real-life experience of co-parenting his children, ages 14 and 9, both in his work on camera and in his interactions with his co-star on set.

In the film, Cho plays Max, a single father who long ago gave up his dreams of a music career to solo-parent 15-year-old Wally (newcomer Mia Isaac) when his ex-wife walked out on the family. A terminal cancer diagnosis prompts Max to rope Wally into a sprawling road trip from their home in California to his 20th college reunion in Louisiana, where he hopes to introduce his daughter to her estranged mother since she’s the only family she’ll have left once he’s gone. Of course, Max doesn’t let Wally in on his diagnosis or his plans for a surprise mother-daughter reunion — he just sells the trip to her as a long-awaited, extended driving lesson under his overprotective watch.

Acting opposite Isaac was “a gift,” Cho said. “She felt like she could be my daughter. She looked like she could be my daughter.”

Originally, screenwriter Vera Herbert (co-executive producer of “This Is Us”) wrote Max and Wally as white characters, inspired in part by her own life story, director Hannah Marks explained in a separate video interview with The Chronicle from Los Angeles.

“John Cho was just so perfect for the role. He has a daughter in real life. He was in a band, just like Max. He’s such a brilliant actor, it didn’t feel like ethnicity mattered,” Marks said, noting that she was particularly impressed by his performance as a widower father in the 2018 Silicon Valley-set thriller“Searching.”“It felt like, ‘Let’s cast the person who’s best for this role.’”

WithChocast as the film’s Korean American lead, Marks and her team followed suit by bringing aboard Isaac, who is of Black and Asian descent.

“John and Mia loved each other right away,” Marks said. “From their very first Zoom, it was so clear that they had chemistry. That only grew over the course of working together.”

Cho, 50, shared that both he and Marks, who began acting at age 12, felt protective over Isaac, who is now 18, as she worked on her first major production. Portraying a Black and Asian American family, still a rarity in Hollywood in 2022, required particular sensitivity, he noted.

“The experience of being a person of color in America is that constantly people regard your color or your skin first. It’s the overwhelming piece of information that they see in front of you,” Cho explained. “Yet, on a day-to-day basis, how we feel is much different, which is to say you feel like a person — a father, a mother, a kid, a student, an actor, a writer — you’re just going about your day, and so being Asian or your color is not something that you consciously feel.”

So it makes sense that “Don’t Make Me Go” isn’t trying to be a story that’s explicitly about race. Rather, the film’s focus is — wisely and refreshingly — the father-daughter bond and the surprising lessons the characters can teach one another.

“The movie feels authentic in that way, which is to say it’s not particularly aware of (race). It’s there. It’s not ignored. It’s just not something that the film is conscious of all the time, and in that way it feels very authentic,” Cho added.

Marks, whom Cho described as a “mama bear,” said she and her team took care to allow Isaac to share her real-life experiences of having a Black father and an Asian mother through the story.

“She really infused her own personal stories and anecdotes into the character,” Marks said, pointing to a joke in the film where Wally ribs Max for forcing her into traditional African dance classes — a line drawn directly from Isaac’s own experience with her mother.

“It was important to Mia that the representation of being mixed was one that was portrayed as being positive,” Marks continued. “She didn’t really want to tell any stories about feeling oppressed, because she feels that we see that a lot on film and TV. I really respected that.”

曹,说他早,formative experiences as an actor informed the ways that he bonded with Isaac.

“I did put some effort into thinking about how I wanted her first feature film to go. I wanted it to go well for her,” he said, recalling his first roles in “Shopping for Fangs” (1997) and “Yellow” (1998) when he was in his mid-20s. “Hollywood is a little like a permanent high school. It’s tough to be young. I can see why it’s such a difficult experience for child actors.”

While the American-road-trip film was shot entirely in New Zealand — a necessity due to Cho’s tight schedule filming the Netflix series “Cowboy Bebop” — the actor credits the Bay Area for cultivating his roots as a performer. “Berkeley is where I became settled upon my adult self. It’s where I started acting. My first professional show was through the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. I will always have a soft spot for the Bay Area.”

Unable to resist the urge to close out with a Golden State Warriors dad joke, he added, “I was a Kuminga when I arrived, and I left a Thompson.”

“Don’t Make Me Go”(R) is available to stream Friday, July 15, on Prime Video.