Tropicana Magazine Nov-Dec 2018 #121: Festive Frivolities

THE GAME CHANGER
T
wo years ago, director Jon M Chu
faced the biggest deadline of his
career. He had ten 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 Britishraised
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 romcom 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
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