Shang-Chi’s Awkwafina on Lucy Lui, Golden Globes and Crazy Rich Asians
The actor who stole the show in Crazy Rich Asians and broke hearts in The Farewell will storm onto screens in the Marvel blockbuster dubbed the ‘Asian Black Panther’.
One thing you can do in September, up and down the coast of New South Wales, is head out into the ocean on a boat looking for whales. Dolphins too. As if the general, limb-loosening blossoming of spring isn’t enough on its own, September puts the best of Mother Nature on display. Because the whales you can see in September, within an easy journey from Sydney at least, are babies, little calves frolicking alongside their mothers in the enormous, personal playground that is the Pacific Ocean.
Anyway, Nora Lum didn’t see any. The actress – known by her stage name Awkwafina in Hollywood – but who goes by her birth name everywhere else, has been living in Sydney for four months, making Marvel’s first Asian superhero movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings . On a recent day off in September, she went searching for some whales. Lum was accompanied by her Shang-Chi co-star Michelle Yeoh – the pair know each other from Crazy Rich Asians, in which Yeoh played the chic but chilling matriarch and Lum stole every scene.
“But we didn’t see any,” Lum says. “All we saw was this sea lion, like a walrus? He was on a buoy, and he was holding on with one fin, and he was looking up in the air, and it looked like he was laughing at us for not being able to find a whale,” she recalls, the words tumbling out in one long screed in her raspy Fran Drescher drawl.
Lum is a storyteller in a way that can only be described as aerobic: when she’s onto a good yarn, your heart rate increases. It’s as if the anecdote is as much a physical activity as it is a verbal one, as if she’s feeling that story in her whole, entire self. For a second she is the sea lion, or the walrus, or whatever it was. She raises her hand/fin and mimes gripping onto an imaginary buoy, face scrunched up in hysterics. Then she’s back, Lum again, sitting on the couch in her sleek apartment at the top of The Rocks. “At least we saw him,” she concludes, with a sly grin.
There’s a metaphor here, somewhere. Or possibly just a joke. The comedian tells a great story – later, she’ll recount her elastic time in Sydney’s hotel quarantine with Shakespearean melodramatics: the ups, the downs, the blissfully long showers during which she’d light a candle, just to really “savour it”. She’s effortlessly funny. Even the emphasis she puts on the words ‘sea lion’ is funny. But she’s also curious and observant. I might be interviewing her, but she wants to know about me, about my Chinese dad, and what it’s like structurally, spiritually, to be a writer.
Maybe it’s because in another world, Lum might have been one too. Before she professionally assumed her alter ego Awkwafina, when she was just Nora from the New York borough of Queens, Lum studied journalism at university. But then she started rapping under her pseudonym on YouTube, releasing a bawdy, genital-forward anthem called My Vag that went viral in 2012 and has since flirted with six million views. She kept making music, got a few small film roles, and then in 2016 she was cast – via FaceTime – as a crafty pickpocket in Ocean’s 8 alongside Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett and Rihanna. That movie came out in 2018, just months before she broke big in Crazy Rich Asians, a box office-smashing hit and the first time an all-Asian cast had led a major Hollywood film in 25 years. In a sea of talent, Lum’s electric turn as the loveable and loudmouthed Peik Lin stood out.
Director Jon M. Chu desperately wanted Lum for the role – so much so that he included her on his initial pitch, even before she officially signed on.
“There was no one else who could do that Peik Lin thing but Nora,” Chu explains over the phone, on his birthday (“Of course! Anything for Awkwafina.”) “For as loud and as big as she is, underneath it all is this empathetic heart and this love for others. Even hanging out with her, she’s the same,” Chu adds. “The audience can read bullshit, and she’s no bullshitter.”
People often tell Lum that they cried watching Crazy Rich Asians. It isn’t remotely a sad movie – it’s an exquisite soufflé, a romantic comedy about how nice it would be to discover that your lovely, albeit a little vague, boyfriend is sitting on a veritable gold mine of personal wealth and good genes. But people don’t cry watching Crazy Rich Asians because they’re sad. They cry because they’ve finally seen people that look like them on a big, fancy cinema screen, doing something as ordinary and extraordinary as falling in love.
It can be difficult to explain this feeling to someone who has never desperately searched for their reflection in pop culture. It’s like a light has been turned on, deep inside you, and the warmth spreads out from your toes. Lum gets it. “When you’re young and you turn on the TV and don’t see kids that look like you, then by default you take the perspective of an outsider,” she explains. “Without [representation], you’re literally sitting there playing imaginary friends.” As a child she got hooked on Margaret Cho and Lucy Liu and credits watching them for the entirety of her career. Essentially, if it wasn’t for Liu in Charlie’s Angels, there would be no Awkwafina.
Or me, for that matter. I clung to Liu as a teenager when I didn’t see anyone else who looked like me at the cinema – and I use the phrase “looked like me” in relation to the movie star Lucy Liu outrageously and phenomenally liberally. I start recounting that scene in Charlie’s Angels when Liu whips off her helmet and shakes out her hair, a moment that will live rent-free in my mind forever.
“Were you influenced by Lucy Liu too?” Lum interjects, leaning forward. She sweeps her hand across her head, mimicking Liu’s own movements. “Remember she tucked it? And there was a side part,” says Lum. “Unachievable hair!” (Lum’s hair is, for the record, Liu-esque, glossy and immaculate.)
This is why representation matters. Think about it: Lum and I spent ages discussing our Liu obsession, because Liu was the only person we had to latch onto as teenagers. But one person is not enough. Lum wants to live in a world in which our entertainment represents the breadth of cultural experience and doesn’t make us feel alone in a crowded space. Her entire career is in service to this goal: she has pointedly turned down roles because they were flat or offensive stereotypes. Instead, you’ll next see her in everything from Disney’s Asian-led Raya and the Last Dragon and Shang-Chi to a poker drama, a whodunit and a Netflix comedy in which she plays the hot mess younger sister to the one and only Sandra Oh. Some of these projects have diversity behind the scenes, too, which is key.
“It’s different than just being the Asian front girl, in a group of girls, with no development, no substance,” she explains. “You want to be able to tell those stories, and tell them authentically. That’s representation.”
Still, there’s a lot of pressure that comes wrapped up in being a spokesperson for your culture. Pressure and anxiety – and Lum is already an anxious person. It’s partly what makes her so skilled at what she does: jokes are always a marriage between tension and release, and actually the more tension the better. That’s why laughter feels so good.
As a teenager, she had “a lot of inner angst”. “I felt that there were things I wanted to do, that I would probably never achieve. I was confronted with that all the time,” Lum admits. Her Korean mother died of pulmonary hypertension when Lum was four and she was raised by her Chinese dad and grandmother. That’s when she discovered comedy. “I just remember feeling very uncomfortable, making someone feel better – like an adult who was crying,” Lum recalls. “I wanted to symbolise joy, and let them know that this horrible thing happened, but I’m okay.”
At high school, her angst coexisted with an “unrestrained” confidence and class-clownery. There was this one time when Lum was in a pizzeria and Liam Neeson, a man with a very particular set of skills himself, walked in. “I straight up was like: ‘Hey Liam Neeson, I love your work. But I spent the money for the tickets to The Crucible on weed,’” she recalls. “I would just say shit like that.” Neeson laughed. “He was fully entertained,” Lum says, grinning. “It’s not even confidence,” she reflects. “It’s just no shame.”
That’s the difference between Lum, the teenager fringed with anxiety and a tendency to overthink things, and Awkwafina, the no-holds-barred persona that Lum dreamt up at 16 and has since become her showbiz alter ego. “I still see her as that person that really didn’t grow up,” Lum says.
She got her humour from her grandmother. Lum’s dad’s jokes are dad-y – “Just your typical Queens guy: loves working out, loves his Camry and says that it’s a Lexus,” – but her grandma … She’s properly funny. “My grandma is my best friend,” Lum enthuses. “She saved my life. She took care of me after my mum passed. To this day, she understands me.” This is the longest they’ve spent apart and Queens, Lum sighs, “does feel far”. There’s FaceTime, but it’s not the same. “Her left eye’s doing great,” Lum jokes. “That’s what is mostly in frame … I haven’t seen her full face at all.”
When Lum was making The Farewell two years ago she cried every night, thinking about what she would do without ‘Grandmafina’. The movie, based on writer-director Lulu Wang’s own family, is about an American- Chinese woman maintaining an excruciating fiction that her beloved grandmother isn’t dying of cancer. No wonder it rattled her. Plus, Lum made the film in 2018, the strange and unmooring year in which she burst out of two blockbusters, released her second album, hosted Saturday Night Live and turned 30. It was a lot. “Discombobulating is definitely the word,” Lum says.
Her chief concern was not getting swallowed up by everything. “Seeing all these awesome things happen, taking them for what they are, being grateful for them … But also, not losing yourself to them in a way that [you think] this is how it’s always going to be,” Lum explains. “It’s not.” This is her old friend anxiety talking, and also just the way she processes her new reality as a celebrated actor, powerful producer and, now, a Marvel superhero. Recently, Lum spent a good portion of lockdown in a “very mandatory period of self-reflection”. “I think I had a lot of insecurities,” Lum considers. “They became clearer. And there was this urgency to address them.” Now, Lum is sanguine about the future. “I want to be at peace with the things that I can’t control,” she offers. “I want to be at peace with what life gives me.”
Because Lum has struggled with that in the past, particularly with her impostor syndrome on The Farewell. “I was like, I really don’t think I can do this. But it’s so special to me. I have to try,” Lum admits. “That’s why Lulu is incredible, because she saw things in me that I didn’t even realise existed.” Wang tells Vogue it was Lum’s “authentic connection to the role and to her own grandmother that made me know she was going to live the role, and not just play the role.” For Wang, Lum’s gift is that “she really can’t be limited by whatever box people might want to put her into… she truly has incredible range to do anything that she wants.” And, as Chu also stresses: “Nora’s only just getting started.”
In January, Lum was awarded a Golden Globe for her devastating performance in The Farewell. In becoming the first Asian American to win in the best actress category, she also beat out Cate Blanchett and Emma Thompson. “I can’t believe it was this year,” she says. “When I think about it, even right now, I still get the chills.” She celebrated all night and then went home, stashed the award in a box under her bed – “not because I want to shut it away, but because I’m really scared something’s going to happen, like I’m going to drop it,” – and came to Australia to make Shang-Chi.
Production had only just kicked into gear when Covid shut it down in March. She returned in July, quarantined, and has been living in Sydney ever since, ordering industrial quantities of Malaysian food and eating “sausage rolls and meat pies”, Lum rattles off impressively. “I’ve been here for so long, I’m Australian,” she jokes. “I literally asked my friend the other day: ‘You’re veggo, right?’ Because y’all add Os to everything.”
When we speak, holed up in her apartment, it’s less than 24 hours after filming finished on Shang-Chi. It was “an experience like none other”, she says, and surprisingly physical: “I was like: ‘You’ll CGI all that.’ But no. You’re actually hanging off poles. That was sick.”
Expectation for the film, which is already being called the Asian Black Panther, is stratospheric. “We feel it,” Lum admits. “But I’ve always been a part of projects where I felt like … if I had nothing to do with it, it would still mean something to me.” The point is to tell a good story, before anything else. “I think that alone eases any feelings of pressure,” Lum adds. “It’s an honest telling of a story and it is something that is universally understood.” That message couldn’t be more crucial, after the rise in racial attacks on Asian communities – a recent survey found that 31 per cent of Asian Americans had experienced discrimination during Covid. “I was deeply disturbed and saddened by some of the stories,” Lum says. “It’s ignorance. That’s what it comes down to.”
Can a movie really shift cultural attitudes? I think so. But I’m someone who cried during Crazy Rich Asians. The task for Lum, through Marvel movies and beyond, is how to best wield this particular power and responsibility that she finds herself in possession of. She knows that she’s made her family proud – “my grandma’s always been proud, before any of this” – but now she wants to make her culture proud, too.
“It’s a double-sided coin,” she muses. “The good things that happen to me will, if anything, show someone like me when I was a kid, that you can do it. That’s all I really want. I don’t necessarily want to fuck up, and then [because of that] my culture is fucked up. So there is that pressure. But mostly, it’s literally just being who you are, and that shows the world that we’re different … If the responsibility, then, is just to be a fucking good person, and to not be shady and put shady things into the world. …” She grins. “That’s not too much to ask for.”
Raya and the Last Dragon is in cinemas on March 25, 2021. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is in cinemas on July 8, 2021.
This story appears in Vogue’s December issue, on stands Monday December 14.