After starring in the 2015 Broadway revival of The King and I, Ashley Park became friends with her costar Daniel Dae Kim. “He had become such a great mentor and champion of mine,” she tells Little Gold Men. “Just really believing in me and encouraging me.”
One day a few years later, Kim texted Park that he’d heard about a new film in the works that he thought she might be right for. At the time, it was called Joy Fuck Club. “I don’t think I’ve read a script where I laughed out loud that much,” she remembers.
The film, helmed by Crazy Rich Asians cowriter Adele Lim, would be a raunchy, hard-R comedy in the vein of Bridesmaids or The Hangover, centering on four friends who travel to China together and end up on a wild adventure involving drug smuggling, threesomes, and K-pop.
At the time, Park had a healthy career onstage, and she’d earned a Tony nomination for playing Gretchen Wieners in the Broadway adaptation of Mean Girls. But her screen time had been limited; she hadn’t yet appeared in Netflix’s breakout series Emily in Paris or the comedy series Girls5eva. So she wasn’t sure she had a chance. “I remember really feeling like, I would love a shot at this, but even if I’m not involved, this is definitely a movie I will go watch first thing when it comes out,” she says “I was just so excited that it was happening.”
But Park actually booked the lead role of Audrey, a lawyer who goes to China on a business trip and ends up looking for her birth mother, leading her to discover much more about her identity. She’s joined by her childhood best friend (Sherry Cola), her friend’s eccentric, K-pop-loving cousin (Sabrina Wu), and her former college roommate who’s since become a Chinese soap star (Stephanie Hsu). The film, now called Joy Ride, is a wild, laugh-out-loud ride that also explores friendship and identity through its characters’ story. Hitting theaters July 7, after premiering at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival in March, it’s also a rare studio film written by, directed by, and starring people of Asian descent. And for Park, it marked her first time leading a film, allowing her to grow as both an actor and a person.
Vanity Fair: Audrey seems very put together at the beginning of the film, but definitely goes on this journey of growth. What did you like about her arc?
Ashley Park: What I really connected to was that I was first starting to reflect on being in an industry and in a world that was very much built by and for white people or people who didn’t look like me. I really connect to all of the negotiation that Audrey goes through to find a way to be genuinely ambitious and excited to be in this world that she really had no part in at first. And also just the fact that she really—it wasn’t that she was trying to ever deny being Asian, but she just really had never faced that part of her identity and was fine with it. I think that it really mirrored that time in my life too.
Rebecca Ford
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