‘Joy Ride,’ Adele Lim’s directorial debut, makes Asian Americans the ‘heroes of the story’
The Emerson alumna who co-wrote ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ discusses her racy new comedy — starring Ashley Park and Sherry Cola — out this week
Adele Lim graduated from Emerson College in 1996. As a student, she didn’t have the “foresight” to predict where she’d end up in the entertainment industry. “It was a surprise to me to learn that you could be a paid television writer, period,” Lim said in a recent interview.
But Lim made a name for herself in Hollywood as a TV writer and producer and co-writer of the films “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Raya and the Last Dragon.” Now, her directorial debut “Joy Ride,” a risqué comedy featuring an Asian American cast, opens in theaters this week.
In “Joy Ride,” Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) are Chinese American women who grew up together in a predominantly white suburb. A big-time lawyer and transracial adoptee, Audrey goes to her motherland to close a business deal, with artist Lolo as her translator. Lolo’s cousin, the socially awkward Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), and Audrey’s college friend and Chinese soap actress, Kat (Stephanie Hsu), join the two early on. The trip suddenly turns into a search for Audrey’s birth mother, which leads to absurd (and often, explicit) escapades, including pretending to be a K-pop group to get through airport security.
Lima nd writers Cherry and Teresa Hsiao conceived the film from conversations about wild dating stories (all three are credited for the story, and Chevapravatdumrong and Hsiao for the screenplay). Lim spoke with the Globe about helming the film, that Kpop scene, and bringing attention to pay disparity in Hollywood.
Q. I feel like the characters are very uncensored in a way that Asian American characters usually don’t get to be. What was your approach to incorporating sexuality in the film?
A. We wrote this movie to crack ourselves up. Our personalities are a little spicy, and it just was a natural fit. I think we were cognizant of how
Asian females have been portrayed with a certain kind of sexual tone, but that’s from a very specific male outsider point of view. We wanted this to be purely on our terms, our point of view, where we were the heroes of the story.
Q. Audrey and Lolo start out as childhood friends. What does their friendship mean to each other as adults?
A. What I love about the Audrey-Lolo relationship is that we all have had friendships like that. It speaks to a very specific female friendship where you can be each other’s closest soulmates and each other’s harshest critics and go from being these blood sisters to feeling completely estranged from each other. Even though [“Joy Ride”] is this crazy, R-rated comedy, at the heart of it, it really is a story about friendship.
Q. What made your four lead actors work so well together as an ensemble?
A. That’s not something anyone could have predicted. You have four actors that have never worked together. But from the very first moment of them coming together, there was this realization that this was a special project. None of them had ever been number one on a call sheet, had been the star of a major Hollywood movie, and this was a movie that really put them smack in the middle of it.
Q. Can you tell me about choosing Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” for the K-pop scene?
A. That is one of my favorite parts of this movie. We had all these different songs, and none of them felt completely right. At the end of the day, I remember thinking like, “What is this movie about?” And it really was a movie about female confidence and sexuality and owning it. And at that moment, Cherry, Teresa, and I were obsessed with “WAP.” This was just a couple of weeks before we started shooting, and we were told there was no way we were gonna get the song. I wrote a letter to Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, basically talking about how much this movie meant to me, particularly as a woman of color, in a story that celebrates female sexuality and how much the song was an anthem. They got back to us and said “yes,” gave us their blessing. So we ran with it.
‘We’ve all felt the pressure, particularly as Asian women, to be the really good girl, the girl who gets the straight A’s . . . without taking a moment to feel like, “What is it that we really want to do in life?” ’
Q. How was your experience directing for the first time?
A. I love directing. I spent most of my career as a TV writer-producer, and all that experience of being on set, working with actors, figuring out all aspects of production really did help set me up. But also [I had] the allyship and the support of my mentors like Jon M. Chu, who directed “Crazy Rich Asians.” I was putting myself through at-home director school because we shot during the COVID pandemic, and he would get on Zoom with me for hours, just walking me through the process.
Q. You left the sequel for “Crazy Rich Asians” because of pay disparity.
A. It was terrifying in the moment [to step away]. You don’t wake up thinking, “I want to be the face of pay equity.” I think I was most worried that [decision] was going to be the defining moment of my career, that it wasn’t the 17 years I spent as a writer ... but I was so grateful that I did because it really connected me with so many people — women, people from underrepresented groups who had gone through a similar experience and felt like they couldn’t speak up.
Q. Which of the four characters do you relate to the most?
A. I like to say that at some point in my life, I’ve been every single one of those characters, but the one I probably resonate with the most is Audrey. We’ve all felt the pressure, particularly as Asian women, to be the really good girl, the girl who gets the straight A’s and the gold star, without taking a moment to feel like, “What is it that we really want to do in life? What is it that brings us joy? Is there an inner freak to us and do I get to celebrate that? Do I get to even admit it?” There’s a lot about Audrey’s journey that will speak to a lot of people.