42 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
PROFILES
REPRESENT!
Being Constance Wu.BY JIAYANG FA N
T
he mid-July sun at Waialua, on
the north shore of Oahu, was
already so unforgiving at 9 a.m.
that the ice in a cooler of LaCroix near
the foot of Constance Wu’s chair had all
but melted; an assistant heaped up the
few remaining cubes around the cans. It
was the first day of principal photogra-
phy on the movie “I Was a Simple Man,”
an intergenerational family drama set
partly in nineteen-fifties Hawaii, and
Wu was being readied for continuity
photos of her character, Grace, an eth-
nically Chinese woman whose family
has lived in Hawaii for generations. Wu
wore a floral dress with swirls of tur-
quoise, and a waxy white orchid was
about to be pinned behind her ear. When
the stylist, a genial man whose beard and
burly physique gave him the air of a trop-
ical Santa, imparted a gentle wave to her
hair, she yelped and winced repeatedly,
convinced that she’d been burned. He
assured her that what she felt was just
freshly curled strips of hair brushing her
skin. Wu kept close watch in the mirror
as the makeup artist, a woman with wrist
tattoos named Jordann, worked on her
face. Eventually, Wu cocked her head,
grimaced, and said, “I feel like you are
making me look too pretty.”
Wu cast around for an example of
what she was hoping for. “Like, you
know how Brie Larson looked in ‘Short
Term 12’?” Jordann hadn’t seen the movie.
“Elsie Fisher in ‘Eighth Grade’?” A sorry
shake of the head. Appraising her face
once more, Wu said, “I mean, I feel like
I’m at a magazine shoot, but I’m not
sure I feel like the character.”
Jordann explained that the film’s
writer and director, Chris Yogi, had
shown her a video of an actress wear-
ing the look he envisaged for Wu’s char-
acter. “He’s a guy,” Wu said, conspira-
torially. “He probably liked it because
he thought the girl was hot.”
After a while, Yogi wandered over,
clutching a cup of coffee. Wu gestured
at her face, smooth as the inside of a
seashell, and he nodded approvingly just
as she said, “Too much, right?” She
pointed to her touched-up brows. “I
think it needs to be more natural, don’t
you? More like yours, maybe?”
“Mine.. .” Yogi said, raising his bushy
thickets. Wu giggled. Yogi relented, dead-
panning, “O.K., fine, make it like mine.”
Her objective achieved, Wu dragged a
moist cloth over her face, revealing her
fine pores.
“I Was a Simple Man,” an indie proj-
ect with a tiny budget, had taken a while
to come together. Wu had workshopped
the film at the Sundance Directors Lab
back in 2015, and not long before that
she had been a full-time waitress, forty
thousand dollars in debt, with only a few
acting credits to her name. But 2015 was
her breakout year, thanks to her role in
ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat,” the first
Asian-American-led network sitcom in
twenty years. Five seasons of the show
have now aired, and Wu has been nom-
inated for a Critics’ Choice Television
Award for Best Actress in a Comedy Se-
ries four years running, becoming one of
the most famous Asian-Americans to
have emerged from television in decades.
Last summer, she transitioned to
movie stardom, playing the lead in “Crazy
Rich Asians,” an ecstatic fantasy of ro-
mance and opulence set in Singapore.
The first all-Asian Hollywood film in
twenty-five years, it outgrossed every ro-
mantic comedy released in the past de-
cade, and Wu was nominated for a
Golden Globe for Best Actress, making
her the first Asian woman to be recog-
nized in the category in forty-five years.
When Wu was named one of Time’s 100
Most Influential People, she became the
face of a historic moment; the citation,
by Lena Dunham, praised her for being
“outspoken on the lack of Asian repre-
sentation in Hollywood” and pointed out
that, because of her ethnicity, “she is
tasked with being more than just an actor.”In Hollywood terms, Wu, who is
thirty-seven, came to stardom late, and
at first she was refreshingly un-circum-
spect for a celebrity. When Casey Affleck
was nominated for an Oscar in 2017, de-
spite allegations of sexual harassment,
she tweeted, “Men who sexually harass
women 4 OSCAR! Bc good acting per-
formance matters more than humanity,
human integrity!” She added, “I’ve been
counseled not to talk about this for ca-
reer’s sake. F my career then, I’m a woman
& human first.”
But stardom is inevitably accompa-
nied by scrutiny, and Twitter is nothing
if not fickle. In May, in response to the
news that “Fresh Off the Boat” had been
picked up for a sixth season, Wu fired
off a string of expletive-laden tweets
grousing about what many actors would
consider unequivocally good news: “So
upset right now that I’m literally cry-
ing. Ugh, Fuck.” She was immediately
pilloried on social media, and Jimmy
Kimmel, on his late-night show on ABC,
quipped, “Only on ABC is getting your
show picked up the worst thing that
can happen to you.” Wu took to Twit-
ter again, explaining that the show’s re-
up, while wonderful (“I know that it’s a
huge privilege that I even HAVE op-
tions—options that FOTB has afforded
me”), would prevent her from pursuing
“another project that I was really pas-
sionate about,” one that “would have
challenged me as an artist.”
Then, in her effort to convince fans
of her sincerity, Wu echoed the #MeToo
slogan “believe women.” Another wave
of indignation ensued, and the gossip
rags quickly piled on. The Post quoted
anonymous sources who claimed that
Wu, on the set of “Hustlers”—a movie
about strippers who fleece their skeevy
Wall Street clients, which was released
on September 13th—was a “bigger diva”
than her co-stars Jennifer Lopez and
Cardi B, and that she was widely loathed
on the set of “Fresh Off the Boat.” In a