Crazy Rich Asians
Meet the stars of the box-office smash
Two years ago, director Jon M Chu faced the biggest deadline of his career. He had 10 days to present a blockbuster-worthy, all-asian cast to Warner Bros, the studio that was financing his adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s bestseller Crazy Rich Asians, and he didn’t have a leading man. After fruitless auditions in Los Angeles and China, Chu was given a tip from an accountant in the film’s Malaysian production office: while reading Kwan’s brilliant book, she had imagined a particular man as the book’s suave and sophisticated protagonist – the British-raised son of a Malaysian woman who presented travel documentaries on Malaysian TV and whom she had once seen hosting an awards ceremony in Kuala Lumpur. His name was Henry Golding. He had never acted before, but when Chu met him, he thought he was perfect.
This is the kind of fairytale story that Crazy Rich Asians seems to generate. The rom-com is the first Hollywood film to be made with a near-entirely Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club in 1993. Golding plays Nick Young, the heir to a Singaporean dynasty who has moved to New York to escape the gilded cage of his privileged life. When he whisks his Asian-american – and wholly unprepared – girlfriend, Rachel, back to Singapore, she meets with the disapproval of his family.
Like the superhero film Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians has proved that when Hollywood puts diversity on screen, it pays off at the box office: within three weeks of its US release, it became the highest-grossing Hollywood rom-com since 2009’s The Proposal, with box office takings of $120million (£93million). It was due to open in the UK in November, but the feverish response has seen the release date brought forward by six weeks.
Gemma Chan, beloved for parts such as Anita on Channel 4’s Humans, plays Astrid, Nick Young’s most relatable billionaire cousin. Chan plays her with such dexterity and sympathy that she’s become a fan favourite. The film has given both Golding and Chan a profile they would never have achieved in the British entertainment industry. In fact, for years, neither imagined someone with their background would ever be able to enjoy a successful acting career, either in Hollywood or the UK.
Golding, 32, grew up among the beaches and jungles of Malaysia until he emigrated with his parents to Surrey at the age of nine. He attended his local comprehensive in Redhill and worked as a hairdresser for a couple of years. But, at the age of 21, he decided to pursue a broadcasting career – and moved to Kuala Lumpur.
“I was overwhelmed by the idea of being an Asian in a predominantly white society with white faces,” he says of trying to make it on the British small screen. “I didn’t know how to begin to get into that. But I knew Malaysia and South East Asia.”
Hollywood has a poor record when it comes to nurturing Asian actors. Every studio, bar one, passed on the option to produce The Joy Luck Club – in spite of Amy Tan’s 1989 novel shifting 275,000 copies the year it was published. Some industry figures even said the film would be confusing, because audiences wouldn’t be able to tell the Asian actors apart.
The problem persists today. An adaptation of Flash Boys, the 2014 bestseller about the Investors Exchange, failed to get made because studios struggled to come up with of an Asian actor who could play Brad Katsuyama, the IEX co-founder. Whitewashing – casting white actors in non-white character roles – continues to be considered acceptable: Scarlett Johansson took the lead in Japanese action film Ghost in the Shell last year, while Londoner Ed Skrein was cast as Japanese-american character Ben Daimio in a new version of Hellboy (although Skrein later stepped down from the role).
Golding is already aware of the impact he’s having as a mixed-race leading man. “There’s going to be an entire generation of kids who, when they get asked their nationality, are going to be able to say, ‘I’m mixed, like Henry Golding, that actor’. There was no one with mixed heritage when I was trying to explain to kids at school, who were asking, ‘What are you, are you a Paki, are you a Chinky?’ I got in my head that I was half-caste, and that was the worst description you could call somebody, but I didn’t know any better.”
Chan, meanwhile, was warned off acting by her Hong-kong-born father on the grounds that there were so few prominent Asian faces on film. “As a little girl I didn’t want to feel any different,” she says. “It would have made a real difference seeing a family like mine on screen.”
Three decades on, despite being one of its stars, Chan says watching Crazy Rich Asians really touched her. “I found it emotional seeing characters who looked like my family. It was moving to see the food that I ate when I was younger.”
Crazy Rich Asians was mostly filmed in Kuala Lumpur. The film drips with money – lavish palaces, glittering skyscrapers and enough frocks to rival Sex and the City – but it is also undeniably Asian: dumpling-making and Mahjong games provide the settings for crucial conversations, and songs including Material Girl and Coldplay’s Yellow have been covered by Chinese artists.
While the film has been heralded as a breakthrough for Asian audiences and actors – Chan says “two or three projects” with Asian leads have been greenlit since the release of the film – there has also been a backlash from people arguing that it is too limited in its presentation of Singaporean people.
Golding rejects that criticism in typically forceful fashion. “This is one movie, focusing on a fictional 0.001 per cent of a society of rich people,” he says. “People complain, saying, ‘We’re not all like that’ and, well, it’s a fictional movie! Take it for what it is. Celebrate the fact that there’s Asians on screen. This is one small movie that opens that door for other stories.”
If nothing else, it seems certain we’ll
‘I was overwhelmed by the idea of being an Asian in a predominantly white society with white faces’
be seeing more of Golding. He’s already being mooted as the next James Bond. When I raise the matter, he utters the first media-managed line of our interview: “To be categorised as something in a role that is such a strong cultural pop reference is an honour. I’ll leave it at that.” But Golding would make a very good 007: he has the polished confidence of a British gentleman and wears a suit so well that Tom Ford personally requested Golding’s presence at his New York Fashion Week show – the designer-director has also been named as a contender to take over the next Bond film after Danny Boyle’s exit.
Crucially, he’s young enough to carry the role for at least a decade. An Asian James Bond? Crazier things have happened.
Crazy Rich Asians is out on Friday