Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding on the insanity of fame, not being Asian enough, and tribal tattoos

In August 7, 2018, a film premiere was held at the TCL Chinese Theatre – known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre until it did a naming deal with a Chinese electronics manufacturer – in Hollywood. The film was called Crazy Rich Asians . It may have pinged on your radar.

The film’s stars are Michelle Yeoh Choo Kheng, who began her acting career in the 1980s, and Constance Tianmin Wu, who has been acting since high school. The male lead is Henry Golding, who had never previously done a day’s acting, unless you count the murmurs of appreciation he utters during a little 2016 curiosity called Fresh Friendships, sponsored by Subway, in which he and his now-wife, Liv Lo, create, and consume, each other’s dream subs. (Henry’s: multigrain, cheese, extra lettuce and tomato, no onions.)

By the night of the premiere, how­ever, he was not a complete unknown. The casting net for Nick Young, the Singaporean, Oxford University-educated, stupendously wealthy hunk of Kevin Kwan’s original 2013 novel, had been flung wide across the Asian commu­nity. It was not exactly the search for Scarlett O’Hara, but still, there had been buzz. The fact that the dream role went to a non-actor who also turned out to be multigrain – Golding’s mother is Malaysian, his father is British – created an online subtext, not all of it savoury.

Golding and Wu had already appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, his first-ever talk show. “This is insane,” he announced cheerfully; and that was before DeGeneres escorted the pair into a Perspex box with a wind-machine blowing around dollars they had to stuff into the giant pair of Y-fronts (Golding) and the giant bra (Wu) they had been obliged to don. They also had to wear goggles.

“Goggles because money is sharp,” DeGeneres explained. “You know that. You’re crazy rich Asians.”

Golding took it in good part, giving a thumbs-up to the audience. (If you watch the clip online, you can clearly see Wu, who is in a dress, shrinking from the indignity.) When a woman in the audience won a prize, ran scream­ing to the stage, then continued to scream in a way that a viewer might find disturbing, he patted his dollar-bulging crotch and said, gamely, “It’s the pouch.” This was in April, four months before the film opened.