Entertainment

Crazy Rich Asians star Henry Golding on returning to his Asian roots


It’s been a pretty good week for Henry Golding.

The 33-year-old Crazy Rich Asians star has, you could say, been ushered into the Hollywood’s inner circle. He popped up as part of the starriest Zoom ever – an A-list online table-read of the classic teen movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High to help raise money for Core, a disaster relief non-profit co-founded by actor Sean Penn.

Most celebrity-watchers were gawking at Golding’s co-stars Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts and Shia LaBeouf (who aced it as Spicoli, the stoner dude made famous by Penn in the original 1982 movie). But Golding slipped in nicely as Mr Vargas, the caffeine-fiend biology teacher originally played by Vincent Schiavelli. Already the “read” has enjoyed over four million views.

Golding seems more bowled over by the story than the “Hollywood jazz”, as he calls it. “I rewatched Fast Times the other night, actually,” he says. “It’s like another world watching a movie like that, because you see the mannerisms, the American lifestyle of that time. It’s crazy. It’s kind of joyful in a sense.

“There’s so much less to worry about back then! They’re blissfully unaware of what’s happening in the rest of the world. Your world is this mall in this little tiny town. It’s kind of enviable.”

When we speak, Golding is holed up in Los Angeles, where he lives with his Taiwanese-Italian wife, Liv Lo. This year, he has already played a gangster in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman.

“Oh, it was a hoot!” he cries. “It was everything you expect a Guy Ritchie set to be. Growing up in the UK with Snatch and Lock Stock [and Two Smoking Barrels], you hope it would be the same experience and, man, did it deliver.”

Still, Golding has not forgotten his roots, and his latest project is arguably his most personal yet. Monsoon is the new movie from Hong Khaou, the Cambodian-Chinese director who made 2014’s Lilting with Ben Whishaw. Golding plays Kit, a gay single man who returns to Vietnam to scatter his parents’ ashes.

Refugees from the aftermath of the Vietnam war, his mother and father fled the country for England, taking then six-year-old Kit with them. Kit’s life mirrors, to some degree, Golding’s own journey.

Raised in an expat community in Dungan, Malaysia – his father is English; his mother is Malaysian, of Iban ancestry – Golding moved with his family to England when he was eight.

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After a brief spell working as a hair stylist, he returned to Malaysia when he was 21, looking to make it big in television (and soon became a presenter on travel shows).

No wonder he clicked with Monsoon. “[It asks] are you defined by your culture or your citizenship?” he says.

“Myself, being half Malaysian and half British, growing up predominantly in the UK when I was younger, and then shifting back over to Malaysia and feeling that sense of not belonging in both countries really … that’s really what kind of drew me to Kit.”

Golding’s Kit is a perfect example a lost twenty-something seeking his identity. “It’s his first time kind of out of the UK, essentially, and into an alien world where he is tied by blood,” he explains.

“So he has a sense of confusion: ‘I should feel at home here, I’ve thought about this moment my entire life and I thought it would feel like coming home but it doesn’t. It feels like I’ve just stepped on an alien planet and I don’t feel at home at all.’ Slowly through the journey, you see him kind of opening up.”

Golding also chimed with Hong Khaou, who had “a very similar experience” to his character. “His family are from Cambodia, and escaping the Khmer Rouge …[they] relocated to the UK. And so he shared with me his experiences and how it inspired him to write a character [like Kit],” he explains.

“And I think that a lot of first- and second-generation immigrants are going through the same sort of thing all over the world, leaving your current country of origin and being adopted by a completely opposite culture. How does that affect you?”

Certainly Golding seems better adjusted than Kit to his dual identity. His days as a travel reporter gave him a wide appreciation of Southeast Asia, and he speaks passionately about the places he visited. He even stayed in Singapore for the year after Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians came out.

“It became very interesting to sort of walk the streets, and with my cap and sunglasses, and the stares were getting a little bit more frequent. But I haven’t been back for a little while … so it would be interesting to see how life has changed,” he says.

Even two years on, Golding is still appreciating the impact that Crazy Rich Asians has had, not just on his career but on popular culture. “It just became an animal unto its own. It became part of the zeitgeist. And fuelled the frenzy naturally, and it still is … it’s still going crazy,” he says.

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“The amount of people I get tweets from or messages saying, ‘This is my tenth time watching this film. And I still love every moment of it. Thank you so much!’ And it means a lot to the Asian community and how it kind of changed that perception of themselves more than anything.”

Inevitably, talk turns to the sequel, based on Kevin Kwan’s follow-up books China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems.

“They are cracking away on the script. You’ve got two fantastic books that Kevin Kwan wrote. But adapting those types of books can be very difficult for the screen because … the limitations. It has to make sense, visually. More so than on paper.

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“So, yeah, Jon’s whittling away at it. And I think they have made progress. So it’ll be interesting to see what kind of angle they take.”

In the meantime, Golding recently wrapped Snake Eyes, a new film in the G.I. Joe action franchise. This one sounds promising, given his co-stars are Iko Uwais, the Indonesian martial arts superstar from The Raid, and Andrew Koji, the half-Japanese, half-English lead in TV show Warrior. “He’s a phenomenal martial artist as well. So I was the one lacking in the skill department in the beginning,” says Golding.

He trained with elite-level martial artists, and collaborated with choreographer Kenji Tanigaki – who has worked with both Donnie Yen and Jackie Chan – and also stunt coordinator Kimani Ray Smith.

“They put me through the grinder for a month and a half, two months,” he says. “The pain was worthwhile in the end.” He takes a beat. “And the film’s unbelievable.”

This article was first published in South China Morning Post





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