Crab Club is Crazy Rich Asians’ Jimmy O. Yang’s Hollywood production company – and it’s bringing neglected Asian-American stories to screens

Crab Club started as a ‘cool dinner club’ for Crazy Rich Asians actor Jimmy O. Yang and his Asian-American friends. In 2019, it became a production company

The company has two rules for projects – they should spotlight a marginalised community, like Asian-Americans, and all the founders have to want to do it

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Crab Club, run by Crazy Rich Asians actor Jimmy O. Yang (centre), Ken Cheng (left) and Jessica Gao, is a Hollywood production company focused on Asian-American stories that started as a supper club for friends. Photo: AP

Published: 5:15am, 13 Nov 2021

One of the hottest “clubs” in Hollywood is run by Crazy Rich Asians actor Jimmy O. Yang and his producing partners. There’s no DJ or bottle service – but if you gain entry, you had better know how to eat a Dungeness crab.

Yang, whose holiday romantic comedy Love Hard is streaming on Netflix, has turned Crab Club, the production company he operates alongside Jessica Gao and Ken Cheng, into a real Hollywood force.

Why Crab Club? The name comes from their regular crab dinners with other Asian-American friends working in entertainment. The aim was not just to eat, but also to support each other. The meals rotate among their Los Angeles-area homes in the US. For Yang, it was a “cool dinner club”.

“I just felt very normal, kind of like when I was shooting Crazy Rich Asians, where we didn’t have to explain ourselves,” says Yang.

Yang is a co-founder of the Crab Club production company. Photo: AP

Being in Hollywood, the gatherings eventually moved beyond being a support group and became an incubator for television and film projects told on their terms. In 2019, Yang, Gao and Cheng formed production company Crab Club, and it didn’t take long for the company to prove it has legs.