Hand Her the Keys

Hand Her the Keys,Ashley Park took Broadway, then Paris. Now, the actress heads to Beijing for “Joy Ride,” this summer’s raunchiest R-rated buddy comedy.

Hand Her the Keys

Ashley Park wondered if she was a bad person. If maybe she was getting things she didn’t deserve. She’d always been a hard worker, a schedule filler, what with theater and dance and choir and a cappella and piano and, why not, sousaphone — all of which had stopped when she was diagnosed with leukemia at age 15 and ended up in the hospital for most of her sophomore year. Before cancer, she’d tried out for her high school’s production of High School Musical and did not get Sharpay. After cancer, she tried out for Thoroughly Modern Millie and got Millie. She was thrilled, but she was conscious of how she’d changed. She was used to being seen as “the Asian girl.” Now she was also “the sick bald girl.” She wore her wig and tuned up her Charleston and thought, Everybody’s being forced to be nice to me.

Then she got the lead again in senior year, as the tragic Vietnamese woman Kim in Miss Saigon. A group of white girls from choir whom she’d thought of as close friends complained to their parents, then the parents complained to the school: It was unfair to choose a show that favored some people who happened to look the part. This was liberal Ann Arbor, so no one quite said it out loud. What was clear to Ashley was that they were done being nice to her. She pleaded her case and the show went ahead and she wondered what she’d done wrong: “When I was front and center, it was, ‘Oh, look at Ashley; she’s a pa.’ I thought, Wow, I never want to be called that again.”

Park just turned 32. The actress has made a career of being as successful as possible without being front and center. She’d once dreamed of Broadway, modestly — like maybe she’d get ensemble in Wicked? — then she surprised herself. She landed the role of Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls, the musical, and played the henchwoman full of yearning. She jumped to Netflix for Emily in Paris, a show that makes Mindy Chen, Park’s singing, dancing charisma-bomb-of-an-heiress, the improbable sidekick to a junior marketing executive. If you believe her as No. 2, it’s because Park believes it as well. When she was nominated for a Tony for Mean Girls in 2018, she told an interviewer, “What I pulled from for Gretchen is that when I was growing up, always, no matter what, when there was a white girl in the room, I was going to be second best. What I love about Gretchen is she doesn’t want to be anything but the beta.”

But did Gretchen really choose that? Did Park? On July 7, she gets top billing for the first time in her adult life in Joy Ride, a raunchy, friends-trip comedy directed by Adele Lim and co-starring Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola, and Sabrina Wu. When we meet in early June at a noodle spot in L.A.’s Koreatown, Park lists all the firsts Joy Ride represents, smacking the table with her long, manicured fingers: Yes, it’s one of the first times she’s even been approached to play the lead. It might just be the first R-rated studio comedy to star Asian women and nonbinary actors. And it’s definitely the first in which they shove condoms full of cocaine up their assholes.

Park had to bring what Lim calls the “stealth heart” of the movie: Park’s character, Audrey, is an overachieving lawyer who was adopted from China by white American parents when she was a baby and who has spent more time thinking about making partner than wondering about her birth mother. Then a work trip sends her to Beijing along with her slacker best friend, Lolo (Cola), as translator, and Audrey ends up on a hunt for her biological family that spins out of control. (How do Lolo’s cousin Deadeye, played by Wu, and Audrey’s college friend Kat, played by Hsu, end up on this work trip too? That’s just buddy-comedy magic, baby.)

Audrey is the straight man in the fitted stretch blazer, so goal oriented that even a threesome reads like extra credit. It’s a true ensemble comedy — think Girls Trip and Bridesmaids — and though Park was top of the call sheet, sometimes it feels more like Hsu’s movie, or Cola’s, or Wu’s. As we talk about what Joy Ride means for her, Park keeps steering back to what it means for her co-stars. Maybe that’s just her way of playing the lead: She’d rather be part of a team. This is, after all, a woman with a tattoo that reads YES, AND.

Hsu, Wu, Park, and Cola in Joy Ride.Photo: Ed Araquel/Lionsgate

Lim and co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao had wanted to write a movie like The Hangover, all about “celebrating your nasty, disgusting friends” — who in this case happen to be Asian. When I ask Hsu if she’s ever worked on another project where there was more than one part for a young Asian woman, she pauses for a beat then says, witheringly, “Is that a rhetorical question?” Still, she doesn’t think Joy Ride’s Asianness is what we should be talking about. (The Oscars whirl for Everything Everywhere All at Once would stretch anyone’s patience for that.) She thinks it’s more interesting that Joy Ride is a “hard R. There’s a new generation of raunchy comedies coming our way. That should be the focus.”

But the movie does make Asianness the focus. Lim says they were inspired to write Audrey as an adoptee in part because they wanted a character who experienced a heightened form of the alienation that Lim thinks all Asian Americans feel; for Audrey, Lim wondered, “How can we put that character on the extreme of that spectrum of feeling this otherness where it didn’t matter what space she was in?” We watch as Audrey endures multiple people telling her, “You’re basically white.” Lim says this means the other characters think Audrey is ashamed of who she is: “It’s like you’re trying to pledge to a sorority that isn’t about you.”

Joy Ride also finds a way to say it groin-first. We learn that Audrey has never slept with an Asian man before — a problem she solves by taking two of them to bed at once. It was Park’s first time shooting any kind of sex scene: “I’m so seasoned now. To go from never having done a scene of that nature to having a threesome with two guys eating you out is just its own thing.” That evening, she says Hsiao invited her and a bunch of other people over for pizza. “Teresa just goes, ‘Okay, everyone, let’s slow clap for Ashley: first Asian kiss, first Asian sex.’” Park was embarrassed. She’d never been with an Asian guy either — though she has now. “What I’ve learned is good guys are good no matter what they look like. And toxic, awful guys are also Asian sometimes.”

Park is good at making friends in her industry. She drops, casually, that she knows a few of the Blackpink girls — Jisoo, Jennie, Lisa. She counts Collins and Florence Pugh, whom she met at a Valentino show last year, among her confidantes. Pugh says that when they get together, “We’ll do face masks. We’ll order room service. We’ll laugh and cry and talk all in the space of about 130 minutes.” But her schedule has not made it easy to date, and her romances haven’t tended to last long — until the one she’s in now. She won’t say who her boyfriend is because “we haven’t hard launched,” just that he’s also an actor, and her best friend, and the longest relationship of her adult life. “One of the first conversations we ever had was why we would never date another actor or person in the industry,” she says. “And here we are.”

Park says she is still seeking balance, learning to say no to parties and events when all she wants to do is sleep. When she’s with a friend, she’s plugged in; the next day, her drive is wiped. “You know how I keep energy?” Park says. “I literally, in the best way, dissociate really well.” It’s now been over three years since her last performance on Broadway, nearly four since she first started filming in Paris. She played a small, brutal part in Beef and will be in the next season of Only Murders in the Building. She’s curious about doing more theater — she’s thinking about the West End — but it’s hard to imagine when. We meet in L.A. on the day before Park’s birthday. When I mention this, she looks blank for a moment, then scrambles to look at the date on her phone.

She does not love her birthday: “I get anxious when I feel like people are forced to be kind to me. I never want any handout for any reason that is out of my control.” It reminds her of a powerlessness she’d rather not think about. “I want to earn when people are congratulating me,” Park says. “I wish my birthday was something I earned.”

Production Credits

Photograph by Zachary Scott
Styling by Erin Walsh
Hair by Rena Calhoun
Makeup by Jenna Nicole

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 3, 2023, issue of New York Magazine.

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