LOS ANGELES — In a Beverly Hills hotel near the end of February, the cast of “Crazy Rich Asians” has been trading stories about auditions — both the good ones that have led to successful roles, and the bad ones filled with exaggerated stereotypes.
“I’m very new to the whole auditioning thing,” admitted Henry Golding, the Malaysian-born Hollywood newcomer who will make his film debut in “Crazy Rich Asians” this August. “I’ve seen some notices for ‘ethnic’ roles, but…”
“They just need you to not be white,” Awkwafina explained.
“Because the lead is white,” Constance Wu added.
There’s a sarcasm to their conversation, but beyond that are numbers to back up a well-documented truth: A report released earlier this year by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA found that 1.4 out of 10 lead actors in film are people of color. Of the 174 theatrical films released in 2016 that the report looked at, Asian actors and actresses made up 3.1 percent of top film roles.
It’s part of what’s driven the buzz around “Crazy Rich Asians.” With an ensemble cast led by Wu, “Crazy Rich Asians” will be the first major Hollywood project in a quarter of a century to feature an all Asian and/or Asian-American cast.
But 2018, Wu reflected, is not just the “right time” for a film like this. “I think the time is overdue and we should’ve been doing it a long time ago,” she said.
‘IT’S A MOVEMENT’
Kevin Kwan’s debut novel “Crazy Rich Asians” was first published in 2013. Loosely inspired by Kwan’s own family and his upbringing in Singapore, the story follows California-born economics professor Rachel Chu and her boyfriend Nick Young, the son of a wealthy family from Singapore whose family’s riches are unknown to Rachel. When the two travel to Singapore for a wedding, Nick’s hopes that his family will approve of Rachel are dashed by his mother’s icy reception.
The positive response to the novel landed Kwan on the New York Times bestsellers list and resulted in two sequels to fill out the “Rich” trilogy. In 2014, talks of a film adaptation began under Color Force’s Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson and two years later, with director Jon M. Chu attached and a screenplay by Adele Lim and Peter Chiarelli done, a “heated bidding war” landed the film at Warner Bros.
That sell, Chu said, wouldn’t have been possible without the success of Kwan’s series.
“An existing IP is valuable, no matter what. When executives go to the internet and they look and they see people dream casting a movie that doesn’t exist yet, that’s a great indication that the world wants to see this movie,” Chu said.
He also acknowledged that it was easier to develop the film — its budget, the characters, a production schedule — outside of Warner Bros, who came into the picture after the creative process had begun. That, screenwriter Lim agreed, helped add to the authenticity of the story.
“It wasn’t coming from a place of fear, it wasn’t coming from a place of what we shouldn’t do,” Lim said. “We just knew what we didn’t want to do: We didn’t want to have a romantic comedy dip into really easy Asian stereotypes in terms of depicting Singaporeans or depicting Asian Americans. We wanted to find a way to say, ‘What was specific to our experiences growing up that we can bring that you haven’t seen in a rom-com before?’ We wanted it to feel true.”