Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu on Joy Ride, queerness and the power of finding chosen family

The stars of Joy Ride tells Christobel Hastings about queer identity, chosen family and how their raunchy new comedy breaks the mould.

There’s a recipe for comedies such as The Hangover and Bridesmaids, and it goes something like this: a group of three to four unlikely friends set out on a road trip, only to have their holiday derailed by a series of debauched shenanigans. Throw in gross-out humour, explicit sex scenes and a heartfelt journey of self-discovery, and you’ve all the makings of a box-office hit. 

But Joy Ride isn’t quite like anything we’ve seen on the big screen before, not least because the road-tripping leads aren’t white men.

Directed by Crazy Rich Asians screenwriter Adele Lim, the globe-trotting adventure follows Audrey (Ashley Park), an ambitious Asian American woman raised by white adoptive parents, as she travels to Beijing on a high-stakes business trip. Alongside her childhood best friend and sex positive artist Lolo (Sherry Cola), Lolo’s cousin and K-pop enthusiast, Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), and college-roommate-turned-soap-opera-star Kat (Stephanie Hsu), the trip quickly goes off the rails when Audrey has to track down her birth mother in order to seal a business deal.

As a film with the working title of Joy F*ck Club might suggest, this is an unapologetic raunch-fest, keen to prove that Asian women can be as messy, ridiculous and thirsty as the best of them. The award for the horniest of the characters, however, goes to Kat, an actress who is desperately attempting to hide her promiscuous past from her devoutly religious fiancé. Try as she might to keep her libido in check, she somehow ends up in all kinds of outrageous situations, including shattering a man’s pelvis during an impromptu sex act with a basketball and a Theragun, and scandalising a crowd of K-pop fans (and later, the entire internet) by accidentally revealing a NSFW devil tattoo.

Read the full interview here.