It takes less than 15 minutes for Awkwafina to hit upon a classic first-generation American woe: the impossible, mountainous, maddening task of trying to impress your family.
“People say that you’re never famous as an Asian-American ‘til you make it to the Chinese newspaper,” the rapper-turned-actor said animatedly, sitting on a couch in A24’s airy Manhattan office. Her distinctive Queens-bred rasp began picking up speed. “You could be on the cover of Time, and your parents won’t recognize you until you are on that goddamn newspaper!”
Born Nora Lum, the performer—Chinese-American on her father’s side and South Korean on her late mother’s side—surmises she’s getting closer to this goal. In the last two years, she’s gone from YouTube rapper to mainstream actor, landing a breakout role in Ocean’s 8 and a scene-stealing turn in Crazy Rich Asians. This year, she stars in Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, out Friday: a wrenching, meta-drama based on a true story about Wang’s family which the director first shared the story in a 2016 episode of This American Life.
Awkwafina plays Billi, a Chinese-American woman (based on Wang herself) who discovers that her Nai Nai (the Mandarin term for grandmother) has stage IV cancer and only three months to live. Which is devastating enough—and then she finds out that, per Chinese tradition, her family has decided to keep the diagnosis a secret from Nai Nai. When Billi and her parents go visit Nai Nai in China, they are forced to pretend everything is perfectly fine, an act of achingly hidden pre-bereavement.
Though plenty of comedians have won praise for taking a left turn into “serious” roles, Awkwafina didn’t feel called to The Farewell because it was a chance to fill out genres on her acting bingo card. The drama, which has received impeccable reviews, tugged at her on a deeper level.
“I feel like I have been preparing for this, in a way, my whole life,” she said.
Lulu Wang wasn’t always sure about Awkwafina.
“She was like, ‘The My Vag girl?’” Awkwafina recalled—referring to her viral 2012 rap, which has racked up over 4 million views on YouTube. When Wang was casting her film, that was still Awkwafina’s best-known piece of work—though her onscreen career had also picked up, thanks to roles in movies like Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising and the Netflix comedy Dude. She had also just wrapped Ocean’s 8, a starry project that flung her profile straight into the Hollywood stratosphere alongside costars Sandra Bullock, Rihanna, and Anne Hathaway.
Still, the rising actor was determined to nail her screen test for The Farewell, preparing meticulously to impress the doubtful director. It worked: the “‘My Vag’ girl” was anointed as Wang’s onscreen alter ego, though the director had to tweak one key aspect of the role to suit the actor. In the script, Billi speaks flawless Mandarin. Awkwafina, by comparison, is mostly self-taught. Wang worked that aspect into the story, with Billi’s imperfect Mandarin becoming a talking point among family members in the film. In real life, it’s a nerve-inducing subject—language as the ultimate familial bridge—that takes Awkwafina and I down the first-gen American rabbit hole of anxiety (so! much! to! discuss!). “I was insecure about it,” she said frankly, “but I think it was a good fix.” After all, there are a lot of Billis out there.
The Farewell was shot in Changchun, where Wang’s actual Nai Nai lives. For Awkwafina, raised in New York, it was a surreal, revealing experience—one that connected her to her Chinese heritage while highlighting her Americanness, sometimes in discomfiting ways. “When you grow up in this country, you are made to feel in every institution that you go through—school, everywhere—that you’re different,” she said. But even when she was othered for being Asian, Awkwafina knew how to perform being American—how to sing the national anthem, how to engage with different cultural norms. It was harder to slip into another nation’s highly particular rhythm of things. “I don’t know how to do it, but there’s history here and there’s my people here,” she said. “You can never ignore that connection.”
Performance-wise, the film pushed the natural comedian to wean herself off of humor, which she admits she can use as a crutch. “From a very young age, I wanted to make people laugh to defer from the heavy stuff,” she said. As Billi, the actor’s hammy energy is stripped away; she slumps her shoulders, she confronts, she cries and cries. Her performance is a portrait of vulnerability, proof that she can handle dramatic roles just as easily as comedic ones.
She’s now getting even more chances to underline that point. Her upcoming slate includes the Jumanji sequel, the crime thriller Breaking News in Yuba County, and a 10-episode Comedy Central series based on her own life, titled Awkwafina. The latter project is set to begin filming next week in Queens.
“I’m really trying to evoke a New York from the eyes of someone who grew up there,” Lum said. She’s excited to return to the city that raised her—in part to make the show, in part because she can finally visit the New York Botanical Garden to see the Vanda Awkwafina, a hybrid orchid named in her honor this past February. One of the actress’s earliest memories is of going to the NYBG with her mother, Tia, who died when she was four, and grandmother. Toward the end of her life, her mother would also frequent a church across the street from the garden, while her grandma walked little Lum around the garden. The actor remembers her mom coming out of the church with swollen eyes. “She would sit in the garden, not talking to anybody,” she recalled. “That was her last place of peace.”
Like that orchid, The Farewell is a full-circle symbol, with its hyper-meta themes and unvarnished examination of grief. Its timing feels auspicious, Awkwafina said. She was thrilled to finally show it to her own grandmother—who ended up being, shall we say, not the most attentive viewer. In a recent interview on the A24 podcast, Awkwafina recalled that midway through the viewing, her grandmother got distracted, getting up to cook. This wasn’t unexpected; it’s not like Awkwafina had appeared in the Chinese newspaper.
“There are things about my grandma I’ll never be able to change,” she said, cracking up at the memory. As the screening went on, though, she caught her grandma laughing at a joke about lobster vs. crab that is set up in one scene and paid off several scenes later—a clue that proved she was keyed in to the film’s nuanced comedy.
“She caught that, and I was like, you’re watching that the right way! You’re seeing the dark humor in it,” she recalled. “You can go into it thinking it’s very sad, but there’s something else that Lulu is trying, and she got it. I thought that was really cool.” Then came another surprise: “She also said my Chinese wasn’t bad.”
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