The new comedy film “Joy Ride” features a primarily Asian American cast and is getting a lot of buzz for pushing the raunchy envelope, something the actresses realized right away when they read the script.
“In the original one, Lolo actually does a painting on her naked body. Do you remember that?” Sherry Cola asked her co-star Ashley Park during a recent interview with News4JAX.
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Park said she didn’t.
“So I remember thinking I had to do a little nudity clause,” Cola said.
Park said she was the opposite.
“When I got this part and I auditioned for it, I didn’t tell my parents that I’d be doing nudity because there was none for me in the movie,” Park said. “I was the only character who didn’t have that kind of scene and then all of a sudden, I became the only character who did.”
The film, co-written and directed by Adele Lim, the co-writer of “Crazy Rich Asians,” follows four friends meeting up during a trip to China, which turns into an eye-opening experience.
Park plays a lawyer looking for her birth mom, and Cola is her free-spirited artist friend.
They said the four main cast members were determined to bond during the shoot -- and food helped.
“We loved eating together. Sherry likes to order dinner for everybody like it’s the first and last supper of our lives,” Park said. “And it’s the best. I don’t know how to eat any other way now, you know, family style.”
At one point in the film, the four friends pretend to be a fictional K-pop singing group.
“What’s fun is that we got to kind of bring our own sort of like experiences and strengths. I think we went into the recording studio after and recorded it. I’ve done that a lot. And we got to be there for each other,” Park said. “And when we were all very tired from doing rehearsals on Saturdays for hours after filming Monday through Friday, Sherry would always bring the energy up, like, ‘We got this, we got this.’”
The women are proud of the movie, but the well-deserved R-rating does have them nervous about their families seeing the film.
“I think I’ve been doing a kind of ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’ policy. Like I actually just got a text from my aunt, my Momo, last night and she sent a picture of her and her husband -- my uncle -- and their daughter and my grandmother. And they were by the poster like, ‘We just watched the movie.’ And I was like, ‘What?!’ They’re just very, very genuinely happy for us. And we worked hard for it.”
Cola agreed.
“You’re right. Like even before they get to process the dirty content, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, my daughter is in a movie.’ We defied all odds, you know.”
“Joy Ride” (1 hour, 32 minutes) is now playing.