After starring in the 2015 Broadway revival King and I, Ashley Park became friends with her costar Daniel Dai Kim. “He has become a great mentor and champion to me,” she said Golden boy. “Just really believe in me and encourage me.”
A few years later, one day, Kim texted Park that he had heard about a new movie being made that he thought she might be a good fit for. At that time, it was called Damn fun club. “I don’t think I’ve read a script where I laughed like that,” she recalls.
The film is directed by Crazy Rich Asianscript writer Adele Lim, will be a suspenseful, difficult R-genre comedy in the style of bridesmaids or Hangover, revolves around four friends who travel together to China and end up on a wild adventure involving drug smuggling, three-player play, and K-pop.
At the time, Park had a healthy career on stage, and she received a Tony nomination for her role as Gretchen Wieners in the Broadway adaptation. Bad girls. But her screen time is limited; She still hasn’t appeared in Netflix’s breakout series Emily in Paris or comedy series Girl5eva. So she wasn’t sure she had a chance. “I remember how I really felt, I really wanted to try this movie, but even if I’m not in, it’s definitely the first movie I’ll see when it comes out,” she said. “I’m so excited that it happened,” said.
But Park actually landed the lead role of Audrey, a lawyer who travels to China on a business trip and ends up searching for her biological mother, leading her to discover more about her identity. She joins her childhood best friend (Sherry Cola), her friend’s eccentric, K-pop-loving cousin (Sabrina Wu), and her old college roommate who became a Chinese TV star (Stephanie Hsu). The movie, now called ride joy, is a wild ride, laughs out loud, and explores friendship and identity through the characters’ stories. In theaters on July 7, after premiering at the South by Southwest Film and Television Festival in March, it’s also a rare film written, directed and starred by an Asian. And for Park, it marked her first time acting in a film, allowing her to grow both as an actress and as a person.
Vanity Fair: Audrey seems to get along very well at the beginning of the film, but is sure to continue this journey of maturity. What do you like about her arc?
Ashley Park: What I really connected with was that for the first time I started to reflect on working in an industry and in a world built so much by and for white people or people who are not like me. I really connected with all the negotiations that Audrey went through to figure out how to be truly ambitious and excited to be in this world that she wasn’t really into at first. And the fact that she’s really – not that she’s trying to deny that she’s Asian, she’s really never faced that part of her identity and is fine with it. I think it also really mirrors that period of my life.
