Crazy Rich Asians is one of the mos anticipated films of 2018, and fans have been eagerly collecting any and all news about the film, the first mainstream film featuring an all-Asian cast since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club. Now, fans have got the biggest scoop yet, and it’s all in the exclusive Entertainment Weekly Nov. 10 issue!
JUST ADD COLOR is excited to be able to showcase the exclusive Entertainment Weekly cover and key moments from the article, written by Entertainment Weekly’s Shirley Li.
Here’s a sneak peek at the article:
The film version of the bedazzling best-seller Crazy Rich Asians blazes onto the big screen next year, starring Henry Golding and Constance Wu. EW Correspondent Shirley Li goes behind the scenes of the ridiculously glam romance that’s about to sweep the Far East—and the Near West—off its feet.
This cinematic love story focuses on Rachel, an American-born Chinese, who has difficulty understanding the customs Nick’s family has followed for generations. “This is about a girl going somewhere that’s foreign to her, to really find out who she is,” explains Wu, who plays Rachel. “It’s just such a beautiful story, to show an Asian-American immigrant going back to Asia and finding the things that overlap and connect us all, things like family, things like love.”
Few Hollywood films have featured exclusively Asian principal casts since The Joy Luck Club pulled it off more than two decades ago. As the director behind the first one in many years, Jon M. Chu feels the importance of delivering a hit, “There’s the feeling that if you don’t make a great movie, then all of this is for nothing.” This is not Crazy Rich Asians Who Will Solve All of Hollywood’s Representation Problems, though. Chu says, “We needmany stories. We need another rom-com that’s totally different from Crazy Rich Asians. There just needs to be more.” Chu scrutinized audition tape after audition tape to ensure an exclusively Asian cast, combing nearly a thousand submissions resulting in a giant spreadsheet that looked something like an Asian IMDB. “I think we now have the deepest database of Asian actors that speak English in the world. It was worth it. The best thing we ever did on this movie was cast this cast.”
And while campaigns against the industry’s habit of “whitewashing”—i.e., casting white actors in ethnically Asian roles—have grown in recent years, the practice itself hasn’t ended. During one early meeting with one potential producer who wanted to adapt the novel, Kwan says he was even asked to reimagine his protagonist as a white woman. “I was like, ‘Well, you’ve missed the point completely,’ ” he recalls. “I said, ‘No, thank you.’ ”
Crazy Rich Asians comes to theaters August 17, 2018.
