Constance Wu is the clever outsider who has worked out the joke a beat before anyone tells it, in comedy and drama alike. She is a reliable centre for a film; her parts rarely let her be the one who does the damage.
Fi1m perspective
Constance Wu's people have usually done the sum before the scene starts. In Crazy Rich Asians (2018) Rachel Chu, an economics professor from New York, works out on the plane to Singapore that her boyfriend is heir to one of the richest families in Asia, and Wu plays the rest of the film as a woman who is clever, unimpressed and out of her depth, all three at once. That is the Wu part in short. She is not the one who knows the rules of the house; she is the one who has just spotted them.
She came up through New York theatre and small independent films, among them Sound of My Voice (2011), before Fresh Off the Boat (2015–2020) made her a television lead as Jessica Huang, opposite Randall Park, in the first network Asian-American family sitcom in more than twenty years. Jon M. Chu then cast her as the romantic lead of a studio film with an all-Asian principal cast, the first in decades. She has said of it: "I never thought I'd be considered for something like [Crazy Rich Asians] because I'd never seen any Asian American be a lead." Since then she has been Destiny in Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers (2019), opposite Jennifer Lopez, a part she prepared for by researching strip clubs undercover; Grace, a ghost, in Christopher Makoto Yogi's I Was a Simple Man (2021); Katie Buranek, an investigative journalist, in The Terminal List (2022); and a turn in Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (2022).
What she does well is stand in for us without making a show of it. Rachel is the outsider brought home to meet the money, and Wu keeps her grounded and watchful while the film spends its wit around her. The cost of that job is plain in the same film. Michelle Yeoh gets "how American" on the lawn and the kitchen scene we would not describe; Wu gets to hold the centre while Yeoh gives the performance, and we said so. Yet at that first meeting we found ourselves watching Rachel for the reply rather than Eleanor for the line, which, with Yeoh delivering it, is not nothing. Wu had spent the first act making Rachel someone who notices everything and lets little show, so when the blow landed we needed to know whether she had felt it.
That is the reservation, and it belongs to the parts more than to her. Being the reasonable person at the table is honest work, and she is good at it, but it keeps the camera on whoever is being unreasonable. The reviews so far of Hustlers and I Was a Simple Man point the same way: she is at her best when she is not asked to explain the world to us and is allowed instead to be a woman with her own trouble.
Somebody should give her the money for once, and fly another actor in to be appalled by it.
Biography
Constance Tianming Wu is an American actress. She was born on 22 March 1982 in Richmond, Virginia, and graduated with a BFA in acting from the State University of New York at Purchase in 2005. She began her career in theatre before moving into film and television.
Wu's breakthrough came as Jessica Huang in the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat (2015–2020). She is also known for her roles as Rachel Chu in Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Katie Buranek in The Terminal List (2022). Other credits include Hustlers (2019) and voice work in Wish Dragon (2021) and Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (2022).
In 2018 she was named one of TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People.
