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THE ENVELOPE LOS ANGELES TIMES THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2019
Awkwafinais not herself. She’s also not
“The Farewell” writer-director, Lulu Wang.
Truth to tell, she’s not even Awkwafina.
“Hi,” she says, warmly, greeting a guest
though fighting flu-like symptoms. “I’m
Nora.”
Indeed she is: Born Nora Lum in New
York City 30 years ago, now better known as
Awkwafina, ribald rapping sensation on the
internet and skyrocketing comic actress.
She has a show in the works at Comedy Cen-
tral, “Awkafina Is Nora From Queens.” Her
hip-hop paean to her female anatomy has
more than 4.7 million views on YouTube.
Two of her recent films, “Crazy Rich
Asians” and “Ocean’s 8,” grossed a combined
$530 million. Soon, she’ll appear in “Jumanji:
The Next Level” and join the Marvel Cin-
ematic Universe in “Shang-Chi and the Leg-
end of the Ten Rings” (due in 2021).
And she was recently surprised to find
the New York Botanical Gardens had named
an orchid for her: Vanda Awkwafina.
“It was crazier than you’d think because
the people that did it had no idea my history
with the botanical garden,” she says in her
trademark rasp — sort of a slier and nastier
Brenda Vaccaro (though a bit subdued today,
due to that illness).
“My dad cried, my grandma cried. ...
When my mom found out she was dying, we
would go out to the garden. There was a
church across the street. She would go into
the church and we would wait outside and
sometimes we’d hear her crying. Really just
completely throwing it all out. Then after
that, she’d sit in the garden with us and just
— peace. All that stuff that she had, she bur-
ied it there. So when that orchid came, it
meant a lot.”
Lum was only 4 when her mother died.
She was raised by her grandmother, whom
she calls her “best friend.” Now, the actress
is collecting rave reviews for her sensitive
turn in the late-summer A24 drama “The
Farewell.” She plays the American outsider,
Billi, who must face her Chinese grand-
mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis, compli-
cated by the family’s choice to not tell the
matriarch of her condition, per tradition.
Navigating an all but alien culture in
Changchun, China, is a not particularly
veiled version of Wang, in an absurd and
emotional chapter from the filmmaker’s real
life.
The Times’ Justin Chang wrote of Awk-
wafina in his review, “She’s superb here in
her first dramatic leading role, using herdeadpan comic instincts to underscore the
wryness of Billi’s worldview.” “The Fare-
well” holds a 99% positive score on Rotten
Tomatoes, with a sterling 8.58 (out of 10) av-
erage review. It’s one of the most acclaimed
films of the year so far, with Awkwafina
front and center.
It’s a ride she deems unlikely: “I don’t
look like a movie star. I don’t act like one, I
don’t sound like one. I’m a frumpy, slouchy,
big mouth. Not what you’d imagine.”
Separately, Wang says that though the ac-
tress is distinctly unlike her, Awkwafina be-
came her intended doppelgänger, Billi. Or
vice versa.
“I’m very American, but I speak Chinese
a lot better than Nora,” says the writer-direc-
tor. “But the fact that Nora’s Chinese is so
much worse than mine actually supported
the character because she is so American.
She’s such a New Yorker. Even her body pos-
ture, the way that she slouches. I’d tap her
and say, ‘Sit up straight!’ We’d do a couple of
takes and then she’d get back into that posi-
tion again. So finally, I said, ‘You know, I
think that’s just the character.’
“We shot the New York stuff later. I
wanted to show she’s not this awkward,
hunched-up person,” Wang says. “In New
York, she’s very funny, open, very strong
and independent. So the way she makes her-
self smaller in China works because it’s a re-
sult of her not having agency, not being al-
lowed to talk. That was something Nora
brought instinctively.”
Wang pauses and adds, “I definitely do
not slouch like that,” and laughs.
Awkwafina describes herself as “new to
acting,” but she had the advantage of con-
necting deeply with Wang’s script.
“It was a very intense experience for me.
I cried every night because I thought about
my grandma. It was a full body-and-mind
experience. It transformed me, for sure,”
says the actress.
“When it came to my grandmother, whatI really related to was the goofiness, that re-
lationship we have — both in the movie and
in real life. Half of the conversations I have
with my grandma are just cracking up. I
think when you’re getting ready to lose a
loved one, it’s those moments of joy you
really, really cherish.”
Wang notes that the actress had a break-
through once she let go of her comedic
urges: “Nora told me if things were tense in
her family, or whatever, she would just crack
a joke and that would lighten up the atmos-
phere and that became her superpower. So
she was always cracking jokes with the crew
as soon as we cut. Then she kept saying, ‘I
don’t know if I’m going to be able to cry.
Some of the places Billi needs to go, I don’t
know if I can go there.’
“I said, instead of dissipating the tension
she feels, that Nora feels, she should channel
those feelings of loss, of pain, and hold on to
it. Not try to crack a joke, not try to alleviate
the tension. Once she realized that, it really
brought her performance to another level.
She could just sit in silence and carry the
weight of the things she was feeling, and you
could see it in her eyes.”
Awkwafina agrees: “In my normal life, I
like to keep things light. When my mother
passed, that was how I dealt with it: ‘I don’t
want you to cry right now; I want you to
laugh. I don’t want to be someone you feel
bad for.’ So I carry that with me into my
adult life to prevent myself from being vul-
nerable.
“So for ‘The Farewell,’ I had to be present.
And when you’re present, you absorb so
much more of what’s going on. Those roles
where you lose weight, put on an accent, I
don’t know if I’d be good at stuff like that.
There are actors that can play anybody. But
there was a weird connection to this role.
Even though I hadn’t done drama, there was
something in me that tapped into that. It
tapped into my experience with loss.”
The actress knew to try to win such a de-manding role without the dramatic (and
Mandarin) bona fides would be audacious.
“I wanted to impress Lulu. I think Lulu
said she didn’t want to hire me. In one place,
she called me an ‘influencer’; she didn’t
want to hire an influencer. I was like, ‘OK ...’
“But she saw the self-tape. I didn’t think I
was gonna get it but I think she saw that con-
nection.”
Wang says of that audition, “She had a
rawness about her. It didn’t feel like she was
playing a role. I could feel the love she has
for her grandmother and the pain of not
understanding her grandmother’s culture as
well as she would like to, and the pain of
knowing she’s going to lose her grandma
sometime in the near future. You could see
all of that in the audition, in the silences.
“So often actors, they’re not really listen-
ing. You can almost see they’re just waiting
for their turn to talk. For Billi, so much of the
movie has to be carried by the actress in si-
lence, I needed somebody who could do si-
lence really well and convey emotions
through their face. Nora was just brilliant at
that. It was like a storm was passing on her
face.”
Awkwafina’s grandmother, though, took
some time to fully respond to the film. The
actress brought her a screener but her
grandmother didn’t seem to pay close atten-
tion — toward the end, she even got up to
make dinner. Finally, she said she’d see it in
the theater, “because she was sick of being
nagged about it.”
“My grandma loved it. She was moved.
She told me it had happened to her. It’s not a
weird custom to her. It was cool to show her
a movie I was in that she could relate to.”
But the emotional reactions weren’t lim-
ited to Awkwafina’s family: “A friend
showed me this video on YouTube of people
reacting to trailers. One of them was, like, a
big Awkwafina fan and the other one didn’t
know who I was. They weren’t Asian. They
didn’t know what the movie was about, then
they watched the trailer. There was this one
girl who said, ‘I feel that.’ She had somebody
in her family who had cancer. Through the
whole thing, she couldn’t stop crying be-
cause it reminded her of her own experi-
ence.
“We’re all human. We all deal with loss.
We all have to prepare for that. That’s why
this is universal. When I read the script, I
thought it was very specific to me, to my ex-
perience, but it’s not. It goes bigger than
that.”AWKWAFINA, center, brings her own relationship with her grandmother to
her role in “The Farewell,” based on director Lulu Wang’s experiences.A24