The director, Jon M Chu, was at his wits’ end after a fruitless search for his leading man. He was cast in Crazy Rich Asians – the first Hollywood film featuring an all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club in 1993 – with no prior acting experience. Golding’s easy charm and innate likability is what makes him such an appealing presence on screen.
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“It was a crazy experience and so empowering.” “We fell in love! She was the sweetest dog.” Later, they marched until their feet were sore at the Black Lives Matter protests. During lockdown, he and his wife fostered a blue nose pitbull named Stella. He has asked for the video to be turned off for our chat, perhaps a sign that he no longer wants people to focus so much on his appearance, one that is part Burberry model, part dashing matinee idol. Instead, he finds his sense of belonging “wherever my loved ones are”.įriendly, relaxed and upbeat, Golding is the very definition of a thoroughly nice chap. But this isn’t the experience that I thought I would be having.’ So that just makes you all confused again.” Neither England nor Malaysia, he admits, have ever felt like home to him. I was like: ‘Whoa, I thought I was Asian. It was a characteristically impulsive decision, but back in Malaysia, instead of feeling the warm embrace of homecoming, “I felt like a fish out of water. He packed his scissors just in case it didn’t work out. It spurred him to leave a successful career as a hairdresser at Richard Ward’s salon in Sloane Square, London, when he was 21, to move to Kuala Lumpur with dreams of making it in TV. Once that yearning took hold, he couldn’t ignore it. You start realising: ‘Yeah, I am Asian.’ Then you yearn for a broader understanding of what that means.” As a young man, you start taking pride in who you are. Then growing up in the UK, you slowly start assimilating. “I always felt we were at arm’s length just because of the way we looked. Things gradually got better as he got older. It was a harsh reminder to a young Golding that “you’re different, you’re not British, you’re not one of us”. It wasn’t even the right racist names, but they would just say them because they were kids. We were called every racist name under the sun.
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“Casual racism was rife back then because there weren’t many Asians. Speaking with a cut-glass British accent that has a slight transatlantic drawl, he recalls the playground taunts that would rain down on him as the new kid at school.
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He describes his new life, after his family moved from Malaysia to Surrey, as “a slap in the face”. It’s a question you can imagine Golding asking himself. “But if he grew up in the UK, sways towards being more British, and doesn’t understand anything to do with Vietnamese culture apart from the things that his parents taught him, where does he sit?” “He’s from Vietnam,” says Golding via Zoom from the Los Angeles home he shares with his Taiwanese Italian wife, Liv Lo.
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Back in his homeland, which has changed so much he no longer recognises it, Kit feels like an outsider. He returns to Ho Chi Minh City many years later, weighed down by grief, to scatter his parents’ ashes. In Lilting director Hong Khaou’s lyrical new drama, Golding plays Kit, a refugee who fled to England when he was six to escape the aftermath of the Vietnamese war.