Gemma Chan and Henry Golding had their breakthrough roles in last year’s hit, Crazy Rich Asians. But now, they’re not only acting in movies, they’re also making them.
Chan told the South China Morning Post that she’s creating a production company to “lift other people up.”
“I don’t want to be the only successful Asian actress or British Asian actress, especially when we’ve established there’s so much talent out there.”
Chan has been a trailblazer since the beginning. She recalled that when her father tried to dissuade her from abandoning a promising legal career to pursue acting, she told him she just wanted to make a change in the industry.
“I felt really passionate about it…. Sometimes you have to risk failing to have the chance of being part of a change,” Chan said.
Early in her career, Chan said it was often suggested to her that she’d have more luck in Hong Kong. But she felt that there was already plenty of talent in Hong Kong, and she wanted to carve out a space in the U.K. and U.S. for stories from the Asian diaspora.
“What’s really good for me is to find stories that aren’t just pigeonholing Asians in Asia. I think Crazy Rich Asians is a wonderful example of an Asian story but it’s also about the diaspora and what it’s like for Asian people living everywhere. And, some of the similarities and differences between people who have lived in the U.S., like Rachel and her mum, and then they come back [to Asia] and struggle between two worlds. That is something really ripe to be explored.”
Meanwhile, Henry Golding has announced two films to be released under his new production company, Long House Productions. The first is an action-adventure movie called The Inheritance, based on an original idea by Golding and Alistair Hudson, who is writing the script. The second is Harrington’s Greatest Hits, a thriller that follows an elite assassin.
“I am excited to bring the unique stories that come from my experiences and the time I’ve spent living in Asia, London, America, and all over the world, to the movies that I work on and the material I look forward to developing,” Golding said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Golding founded his company in partnership with China’s Starlight Entertainment Cultural Group. The name of the company is a nod to Golding’s heritage—a traditional home of the indigenous Iban people is called a “long house.” Golding is half Iban on his mother’s side.
Both companies come at a time of increasing visibility of Asian and Asian American stories in Hollywood, due in large part to Crazy Rich Asians. As Chan put it to South China Morning Post, “I just feel like I don’t want to squander this opportunity, like, oh, we’ve done this amazing film and that’s it for another 25 years. I want the opportunities to keep coming.”
If Chan and Golding are as successful with making movies as they are in starring in them, then they’ve got nothing to worry about.
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