Behind 'Joy Ride,' the sex-, drugs- and K-pop-filled raunchiest comedy of the summer

It was originally called The Joy F*** Club.

“It was a loving homage to The Joy Luck Club, which was a key moment for the writers and me,” explains Joy Ride director Adele Lim of the seminal 1993 drama and first major Hollywood movie to feature an all-Asian cast. “We all kind of fell in love with the title, but if you use it, apparently you’re going to get sued by everyone.”

Still, that early risqué version should give you a clue about the tone of Joy Ride. Penned by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao from a story conceived with Lim, the film follows four Asian American friends (Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu and Stephanie Hsu) on a sex-, drugs- and K-pop-filled jaunt across China to find the birth mother of Park’s lawyer Audrey, who was adopted by white parents in the U.S.

The movie opens with a small child getting popped in the face after using a racial slur at a playground, and only gets more debauched from there. There are drugs hidden up orifices, projectile vomiting, a ménage à trois and an unforgettable rendition of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s famously explicit hit “WAP.”

The title was changed, but the raunch was never contested. “When we wrote the movie, we wrote it for us,” says Lim, the Crazy Rich Asians and Raya and the Last Dragon scribe who makes her directorial debut with Joy Ride. “We wrote a movie we wish we had in our twenties, and we fully expected at some point in the process that a grownup was going to come in and say, ‘This is too much. You might need to cut the [raunchier elements] by 50%… But nobody ever had that conversation with us. If anything, they said, ‘We love what you're going for. Lean harder into it.’” (It had to help that two of the film’s producers were Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who’ve made their own artform out of the R-rated comedy.)

There were points where the cast couldn’t believe what they were getting away with.

“The entire film was pushing the limits,” says Cola (Good Trouble), who plays Lolo, an aspiring artist specializing in sex-positive works. “There are so many jaw-dropping moments.”

“I didn’t think we were going far enough, I think you can push the envelope further,” cracks Wu (Doogie Kameāloha, M.D.), who steals scenes as Lolo’s awkward cousin Deadeye. “I want Deadeye to have group sex in the next one.”

It happened for Park (Emily in Paris), who filmed an extra-streamy threesome between her and two men: “My legs are spread, and there are cameras [over my shoulder] and two men’s heads [in front of me]. I was like, ‘This is something I haven’t seen before.’"

“That’s a big ‘I made it moment,’” Cola cracks.

“Once we got on board, I feel like all of us were just trying to go harder and harder,” says Hsu, an Oscar nominee this year for Everything Everywhere All at Once who plays Kat, Audrey’s college roommate who has since become a well-known actress. “To the point where sometimes even our creatives would be like, ‘Maybe Sabrina shouldn't try to stick drugs in your butt. Maybe that's too much.’”

Beyond its sometimes perverse entertainment value, Joy Ride is also earning kudos for marking another big win in the long battle for more Asian representation in Hollywood. While The Joy Luck Club, the movie that inspired its original title, felt like a watershed moment, it never moved the dial (and as star Ming-Na Wen recently griped to us, was completely snubbed by all the major award shows).

It would be another 15 years until the box office hit Crazy Rich Asians felt like a true game changer in 2018, followed by Marvel’s first Asian-led superhero movie (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) and huge Oscar triumphs for Best Picture winners Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once.

“I think every scene in this movie is something the audience hasn’t seen before,” Lim says. “I think what we're most proud of is seeing a group of friends at their messiest, most vulnerable, having a laugh-out-loud, ridiculous time.

"But with these Asian faces at the center, it's something that people haven't seen. But it should also feel true no matter who you are because, you know, when you're together with your friends, just talking about the nasty things you got up to on Hinge or Bumble last week, we hardly get to see those stories. As Asian women, being able to do this in this movie has been fantastic.”

Joy Ride opens Friday, July 7.

Watch the trailer: