From viral video to movies, Awkwafina must ‘find out who I am now’
LOS ANGELES: If you watched slack-jawed as a motormouth character set things abuzz in Crazy Rich Asians, you were most likely watching hyperkinetic rapperactress Awkwafina. She plays a mean trumpet too. Either way, she’s the one who keeps neighbours awake late at night.
Then she was invited to host Saturday Night Live.
Awkwafina was on a plane when her publicist sent her a foreboding text, requesting a call with her whole team as soon as she hit the ground. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ Was it some surveillance video or like a sex tape or something, a horrible sex tape that no one even wants to watch?” Nope. The news that couldn’t wait was that she’d been invited to host Saturday Night Live.
Awkwafina became the second Asian woman to host the show, and only the fifth Asian to host, ever. The significance wasn’t lost on the actress, who, in her opening monologue, revealed that when she was a kid, she stood outside of 30 Rockefeller Plaza the night that Lucy Liu hosted, 18 years earlier. “I love Lucy Liu. I was obsessed with Charlie’s Angels,” says the 29-yearold. “To see an Asian-American on there back in 2000 was quite moving, and to be there and to know that I was the second — it was incredible.”
This was her break-out year. She has starred in back-to-back studio films — Ocean’s Eight and Crazy Rich Asians. Awkwafina, whose real name is Nora Lum, is of Chinese and Korean descent.
She was raised in Queens, New York, by her father and paternal grandmother; her mother died when she was four. She earned a spot at LaGuardia High (of Fame fame) for playing the trumpet, and started producing music as a hobby, choosing a stage name inspired by her self-described awkwardness and creating raps in her spare time.
“When I produced music, that was the happiest and the most fulfilled that I ever was, but so much so that it was, like, a straight-up fantasy,” she says. “It didn’t seem like it could ever materialise into real life — and I knew that.”
After studying journalism at SUNY Albany, she landed a job as a PR assistant. “I felt like I had to fit into a mould,” she says, adding that she took on odd jobs to make ends meet. “I worked at a law library, a bodega, just random jobs.”
It’s been a crazy trajectory to Crazy Rich Asians.
For Awkwafina, it has opened doors she wasn’t sure would ever be open, as an Asian American. “Right now the industry is headed in a direction that is very, very positive, and I think that the reason why I’m working is a literal result of that,” she says. “This might sound weird, but I think that I was looking for someone like me when I was little, just to feel less alone.”
She’s booked several other highprofile roles since, including an untitled film helmed by Lulu Wang, which shot in China, fantasy drama Paradise Hills opposite Emma Roberts, and she’ll reunite with Crazy Rich Asians star (and Asian icon) Tan Sri Michelle Yeoh for the next film from the directors behind Swiss Army Man.
When the cameras are off, a quieter, more private Nora emerges. “I used her in the beginning to draw confidence because Nora did not have confidence like Awkwafina did,” says Lum, who often speaks of Awkwafina in the third person. “When I’m not on, I’m very in my head, very anxious, constantly worrying about (expletive). She’s kind of a lifesaver.”