‘People will sell you down the town’: Awkwafina on making it in Hollywood

Sometimes in a movie, a moment turns from mere punchline to cultural touchstone. In the comedy action romp Jackpot! such a moment comes when the film’s heroine Katie Kim (Awkwafina) arrives to inspect the tiny apartment she is moving into. “It doesn’t look like the AirBnB pictures,” she says, dryly.

As I sit down with Awkwafina to discuss the film, we start with that moment because it leaps out so loudly from the screen, perfectly capturing the transactional failure and social decay of the internet era, where things rarely resemble the promise made by the websites that entice us into the deal.

“It’s weird, if you watch the movie back, I guess you could look at every line like that,” Awkwafina says. “I really love when you can’t tell if a line is written out of some kind of poetic justice or just like a kind of gag, a set piece. And I think that [the film’s writer] Rob Yescombe probably meant it as a little bit of both.”

For the film’s director, Paul Feig, the moment taps into the unfulfilled promise the future gave us when we were kids, one of smooth lines, bubble-shaped houses and gleaming cleanliness. “I remember as a kid, watching The Jestsons, you think the future is going to look like that,” Feig says.

Why one line pops for the audience above others is pop culture’s great mystery. “I can tell you what I think is going to be hilarious, but when you get it in front of an audience, you are constantly surprised,” Feig says.

Jackpot! is a delightfully ridiculous comedy set in the near future when California’s Grand Lottery awards huge multi-billion-dollar prizes that comes with a catch: if anyone catches and kills the winner before sundown, they can claim the prize.

The net effect is a lottery win that becomes a virtual death sentence, and a jackpot-above-everything culture that turns grannies on buses and hairstylists into homicidal murderers, chasing down would-be billionaires to take them out and claim their prize.

The film stars Awkwafina as its heroine, an unassuming actor named Katie Kim who has come to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams. John Cena plays Noel, a freelance security contractor who offers to protect Katie after she wins a multi-billion dollar prize, and Simu Liu stars as Louis Lewis, Noel’s rival in the security business. Both are in it, at least initially, for a slice of the prize.

In a sense, the film’s story is a metaphor for LA itself: aspiring actor comes to town, discovers most of what she encounters is a little less substantial than it seems, has to claw her way to the top – literally, in one scene – and is surrounded by a group of people, all of whom want to take their percentage cut of what she’s worth.

“That’s such a good read of it, and I think that’s exactly what’s going on, it is a metaphor for Hollywood, and how hard and arbitrary it is, and how people will just sell you down the town, pretty much,” Awkwafina says.

“What really kind of drew me to the movie was this idea of a near future, dystopic, but very believable LA, where it’s impossible for anyone to really get anything done, unless it’s through this kind of really intense one-man, man-eat-man kind of thing.”

Awkwafina’s own journey was a little more genteel: born Nora Lum in Stony Brook, New York, she emerged initially as a musician (with an album, Yellow Ranger, and an MTV comedy series Girl Code) and then as a film actor, with smaller roles in Ocean’s 8 (2018), Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019).

Her path to fame was sealed with her Golden Globe- and Gotham Award-winning performance in The Farewell, directed by one of America’s most talented emerging directors, Lulu Wang. Since then, she has starred in her own series, Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, and joined the Marvel universe for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

The title of her debut album as a young aspiring artist, Yellow Ranger, gives a powerful insight into the importance of visible diversity in popular culture. During Awkwafina’s childhood, at a time when there were few high-profile Asian stars, Vietnamese-American actor Thuy Trang’s performance as Trini Kwan, the Yellow Ranger from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, mattered a great deal.

“Growing up, it does affect you, and it affects you in ways that you’re not necessarily protesting it outside at eight years old, but it affects you in these weird ways,” Awkwafina says.

“And I think now, as a person ... I’m not going to be super into myself and talk about how big I am or whatever, but I do know that it’s really important that people can see me, even when I’m not perfect, right?

“I think that it’s important for people to see me in different kinds of stuff because it normalises it, it doesn’t make it seem as like it would never happen. I think when people see me as a kind of a normal, frumpy, slouchy Asian girl, it makes it seem possible.”

The young Nora lost her mother when she was just a kid, and was raised by her father and paternal grandparents, in particular her grandmother, Powah Lum, who became an influential figure in her life.

“My mother passed when I was very young, and so I think that what I derive from female relationships is very, very different from, say, someone that might’ve grown up with a mother,” Awkwafina says. “I felt like, growing up, I had a lot of different mums, like my aunts, people that were younger than my grandma.

“In a way, I’m still growing up, and I meet different women who really just impact me and show me versions of myself that I could be, that my mother obviously is not here to show me,” she adds.

Awkwafina cites collaborations with performers including Sandra Oh and Margaret Cho as enormously impactful. “To be able to see them intimately, who they are as people, those relationships affect me every day as a woman,” she says.

Leaving home for college, she majored in journalism and women’s studies at the State University of New York at Albany, but ruled out a career in journalism very quickly.

“I did not have the nerve for it, the balls for it, the tenacity for it,” she says. “I had a few internships when I was in college for local papers, and the newsroom was so intimidating of a place. Making calls in front of everybody, it just freaked me out.”

And yet acting in front of an audience does not faze her? “Isn’t that bizarre?” she says.

Her other major coursework, women’s studies, left a deeper mark, particularly in the context of an America in 2024 in which women’s reproductive rights are under siege, and the country seems caught amid a deep political schism between left and right.

“I loved women’s studies the most is because it taught me so much beyond just gender and sex issues, it taught me about racism, race issues, class issues. It taught me about how things were institutionalised, these events that happened that were significant.

“First-wave feminism, second-wave feminism, all of these different ideas, in a way, it makes you kind of disillusioned, the fact that we’ve been arguing about the same things that seemed so obvious for years, and years, and years, with no end.”

Unlike the slightly life-weary, awkward Katie Kim, Awkwafina the movie star is delighfully easygoing. In conversation, she is lively, thoughtful and candid. On-screen, she has demonstrated an incredible range, from the very deeply affecting journey of Billi Wang in The Farewell, to Katy, Shang-Chi’s best friend in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

In Jackpot!, Awkwafina leans deeply into a genuinely joyful chemistry with Cena, who is considered one of the most likeable men in the business. The 13-time WWE champion is basically George Clooney with bigger muscles.

“He is one of the most professional, respectful, and kind, and also thoughtful people I’ve ever worked with,” Awkwafina says. “Off-screen, he’s just very real, professional, appreciates everybody, knows everyone’s name. And I think, also, he’s very funny.

“He’s an amazing conversationalist,” Awkwafina adds. “He’s one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. He reads multiple books a day. And so during these long car scenes [in the film], we’d have these just really deep, philosophical, essential conversations about different books that we’re reading.”

Extraordinarily, the film almost never happened. Initially titled Grand Theft Lotto, it landed in Feig’s in-tray and he rejected it. “I just saw the title page and I put it aside and then my producing partner Laura Fisher called me up one day and said, you should actually read that Lotto script. It’s super funny,” he says.

So he did. “And I got about 40 pages into the 100-page script and called her back and said, I have to do this and I don’t even know how this ends. It’s just too funny, too much fun.” (The name was changed after the owners of the computer game Grand Theft Auto objected.)

Assembling the pieces then came quickly, says Feig, but the parts belonged to Awkwafina and Cena the moment they stepped into the same room. Their chemistry could not be ignored, Feig says.

“What’s so great about Nora is that she is an every person, a relatable person, a human being and, as an actor and a comedy person, she is just very, very much your best friend,” Feig says.

And Cena, Feig says, upends the conventional action movie hero. “We’ve seen that character a million times, like the badass Rambo guy who comes in and kicks everybody’s ass, but John is such a relatable, lovable, almost goofball, you know he’s got the power to do it.”

Jackpot! releases on Prime Video on August 15.

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