Tropicana Magazine Nov-Dec 2018 #121: Festive Frivolities

THE GAME CHANGER
diversity on screen, it pays off at the box
office: within three weeks of its US release,
it became the highest-grossing Hollywood
romcom since 2009’s The Proposal, with box
office takings of US$120 million. In UK, it was
due to open 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 UK 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
Southeast 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 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 it 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
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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 | TM