Crazy Rich Asians: Breaking Past Barriers and Stereotypes #book2movie

Henry Golding and Constance Wu on the Red Carpet with Kevin Kwan, the author of Crazy Rich Asians

I haven’t seen a bad Crazy Rich Asians review. My book-devouring sister-in-law enjoyed both the book and the movie. In fact, everyone I know who has seen the movie based on Kevin Kwan’s book loves the film, loves its phrenetic rom-com humor. Now that Movie Pass has put it on the list of qualifying movies at my local, I have to get out and see it myself this week. I’m missing all the fun!

Crazy Rich Asians had a glitzy premiere at the original Grauman's Chinese Theater 

(from my Instagram account)

Part of the reason the movie’s success is getting so much buzz is because Hollywood is only now getting hip to the fact that Americans are ready, really ready, to see Asian faces onscreen in leading film roles. The last time we talked about this adaptation we noted the fact that there are some people who are disappointed that the lead, Henry Golding, is only half-Asian.

We’ve also learned that at one point, author Kevin Kwan was approached with a screen rights option offered on the contingency that the main part of Rachel would be re-written as a white woman! Kevin Kwan didn't respond but told Terry Gross in a Fresh Air interview that he wasn’t surprised:

This was back in 2013. So this was way before the whole Hollywood whitewashing movement began, before all the waves of outrage that happened — justifiably so, with the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, things like that. So it was early days yet, and I knew that this movie would be a challenge because I knew it needed an all-Asian cast, and so I knew that a lot of traditional Hollywood would find it to be not a viable project, and so that’s why I chose to go the team that I did. We thought we would really produce this outside of the studio system and it would be an independent film. … It’s taken on a whole other life that I never dreamed was possible.

You can listen to the entire interview with author Kevin Kwan right here: