Why I'm only half-crazy about Crazy Rich Asians

Nick Chen laments the film industry’s whitewashing, with half-white actor Henry Golding cast as the Asian character Nick, and the under-sexualisation of Asian men

Could you imagine Crazy Rich Asians with a white female lead? When Kevin Kwan, the author of the source novel, took meetings with prospective producers in 2013, it was suggested to him that Rachel, the Asian protagonist, should be rewritten for a Caucasian actress. In retrospect, it sounds unthinkable. For starters, you’d have to change the title. But then there are the angry tweets, the online petitions, and the hassle of working around Scarlett Johansson’s availability (I’m kidding).

Of course, Constance Wu ultimately snagged the role of Rachel, and Crazy Rich Asians has since been touted as Hollywood’s first all-Asian movie since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club. Subsequently, the glossy, gossipy romcom has earned $139m (£105m) at the US box office, and audiences of all races are falling head over heels for its feel-good pleasures.

What has received less attention, though, is that Henry Golding, the British-accented heartthrob who stars as Nick, is actually half-white. In the novel, Nick is fully Asian. In the film, the character is, too. So why are so few people talking about it? To understand why this casting decision – it’s 50 per cent progressive, one might charitably argue – strikes me as particularly egregious, it’s worth examining the industry trends that preceded it.

For instance, cast your mind back to 2000’s Romeo Must Die, a romantic-thriller that famously did not deliver on its title. Not the death bit, specifically, but the film’s absence of Romeo-esque love action. As the story goes, Jet Li and Aaliyah, the two leads, shot two endings: one that climaxes with a kiss, the other a platonic hug. After test screenings with American audiences, only the latter made it to cinemas. It was, yet again, a film studio deciding that viewers would rather not see an Asian man capable of finding love.

Since then, Hollywood has hardly improved. A general pattern has persisted of over-sexualising Asian women, under-sexualising Asian men, and handing fuller, more three-dimensional roles to anyone else. According to a USC study from July, the film industry has made “no progress” in on-screen diversity over the past decade. The disparity shouldn’t be a surprise: it’s happening right before our very eyes.

In that sense, Crazy Rich Asians faces unreasonably high expectations. With director Jon M Chu at the helm, the mid-budget romcom has to be a crowd-pleasing corrective for a lack of representation. “This is more than a movie,” Chu announced, “it’s a movement.” Still, the very least you can expect is for Chu to deliver on the title, right?

Constance Wu received critical acclaim for her starring role as Rachel Chu (AP)

Which brings us back to Golding. On one hand, you might argue that there’s no Asian Hugh Grant. But the semi-whitewashing of Nick worsens when taking into account the PR campaign that led to his announcement. In late 2016, Warner Bros held a worldwide open casting call for Nick, while Chu reached out via YouTube to the “undiscovered talent of the world”. In theory, a Singaporean supermarket worker with zero acting experience had a better shot than Hugh Grant himself. Suddenly, the movie – I mean, movement – was crazy rich with Asian applicants.

So how do you explain the fact that Golding, the actor hand-picked out of thousands, is actually half-white? The trick is, you hope nobody causes too much of a fuss. With a 93 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes, the plan has clearly worked.

At first, there were some murmurings on social media. MassAppeal.com deemed it “kind of a bummer” last year. Jamie Chung, a Korean-American actor, lambasted Golding’s casting as “bullshit”, before tweeting an apology to the actor himself.

But on the whole, Crazy Rich Asians has escaped a backlash for its whitewashing. Which is strange considering the sensitive era we’re in: the negative PR surrounding Johansson in Ghost in the Shell and Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange; the Twitter conversations that pressured Ed Skrein to exit Hellboy so that “the role can be cast appropriately”. After portraying Tiger Lily in Pan, Rooney Mara admitted she was blind-sided by the complaints. “I really hate, hate, hate that I am on that side of the whitewashing conversation,” the actor told The Telegraph. “I really do. I don’t ever want to be on that side of it again.”

What’s more, on Twitter, Emma Stone is still a recurring punchline for depicting a quarter-Chinese woman in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha. Yet a case can be made that Stone is closer to her character’s 25 per cent Asian ethnicity than Golding is to Nick’s 100 per cent Asian-ness.

Two conclusions can be drawn here. One is that few high-profile journalists are willing to criticise Crazy Rich Asians, a film that needs to succeed in order for more Asian stories to be told. The other takeaway is that a certain kind of whitewashing is still permissible in Hollywood. By casting Golding in a landmark role, Crazy Rich Asians reinforces the belief that Asian men can’t play romantic leads. On the rare occasion it does happen, the marketing is slanted and not enchanted: Edge of Seventeen, for instance, did its best to promote Woody Harrelson and Blake Jenner as the male co-stars, not Hayden Szeto, who is in fact the protagonist’s main love interest.

It’s important to note that I sympathise with Golding. While it’s easy to assume a mixed-race actor can have the best of both worlds, the opposite is likelier to be true. Golding probably has more hope of playing a Bond villain than Bond, and it’s unfortunate that a film called Crazy Rich Half-Asians is yet to be greenlit.

But Golding hasn’t handled the situation perfectly. “I’ve grown more than half my entire life in Asia, exposed to more cultures than you can shake a stick at just through what I’ve done in the past,” the actor insists. “If anyone can relate to being Asian in the Asian culture, it was me.” But what does that mean? If you’re a Chinese Londoner who can’t afford a plane ticket, then your background counts for nothing? And if Johansson was raised in the Shibuya district, then her Ghost in the Shell casting would have been cause for celebration?

Ultimately, it puts those of us who care about representation in a tricky position. I want Crazy Rich Asians to do well. At least, I think I do. As a regular cinema goer, I’m used to not seeing myself reflected on screen, and my favourite filmmakers (Noah Baumbach is my hero) aren’t exactly champions of diversity. But Crazy Rich Asians feels like a betrayal, not a movement. It hits me deep inside, because the box-office figures prove that they’re getting away with it. The film should be a major event. But right now, as it stands, I’m only half-crazy about what increasingly looks like a missed opportunity.

Crazy Rich Asians is released in UK cinemas on 14 September