Jo Koy and the cast of Easter Sunday on Asian representation: 'This is America'

Easter Sunday centers on a Filipino-American family that gathers in the Bay Area for a holiday meal, so it's fitting that the film's cast and director tweaked EW's usual Around the Table format to include a proper kamayan feast.

"Kamayan is a traditional style of eating with some banana leaves and food, no silverware," explains Easter Sunday star Jo Koy, who joined co-stars Tia Carrere, Lou Diamond Phillips, Jimmy O. Yang, Lydia Gaston and director Jay Chandrasekhar for garlic rice, lumpia, bangus, pancit and fresh mango. "It's just enough food for the whole family and then some, and you eat with your hands."

The celebratory meal is just one of the many Filipino traditions that get screen time in Easter Sunday, Koy's comedic love letter to Filipino-American families. He plays Joe Valencia, an L.A. stand-up comedian who takes a road trip to Daly City with his son (Brandon Wardell) to visit his extended family — a weekend loaded with in-fighting, guilt-tripping and all the chaos that a family get-together would naturally entail.

Ed Araquel/Universal Pictures

"I want to be specific because that's our story, but I also want to be relatable and that's the family aspect," says Koy. "I want to show our food and I wanted to show the balikbayan box and I wanted to show the Santo Nino. And then [director] Jay [Chandrasekhar] was able to just do it in a way where you can laugh, but not laugh at it, laugh with it."

The film is also notable in that veteran actors Tia Carrere and Lou Diamond Phillips, both part Filipino, are playing Filipino characters for only the first and second time in their careers, respectively. "I've played Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, everything under the sun, including the silent Asian girl in the corner that looks lovingly at her white boyfriend and says nothing," says Carrere of her four-decade-long career. "It's been a long road to where we get to be front and center."

Ed Araquel/Universal Pictures

Adds Phillips: "Way back in the day, I wrote a film called Ambition, where I wrote myself as a Filipino American, so it's something I've been trying to do for awhile. On Prodigal Son, the pandemic shut down a few episodes where we were going to reveal that my character was actually part Filipino. So this is a card I've been trying to play for a long time. It's incredibly gratifying to be sitting here today."

While Koy compares the making of Easter Sunday to "a fairy tale" — Steven Spielberg, impressed by Koy's 2019 Netflix comedy special Comin' in Hot, invited the comedian to pitch a movie and helped fast-track it — he's still frustrated by the lack of representation in Hollywood. "You turn on the TV at any given time and you're going to see a specific story about that demo, the demo that controls Hollywood," says Koy. "There's millions of those movies made. But the minute you get specific about something like us, then it's like, oh, God, you're doing that again?"

"Look at this room, look around right now — this is America," he continues. "There's white, there's Black, there's Asians. Every single color is in here in this hotel, but when we present it on the screen, all of a sudden we have to separate. [Easter Sunday] is specific. Yeah, it's a Filipino family, but it's a Filipino family that lives in America. We're going to learn about it — we're going to laugh about it, then we're going to learn. All right? And I'm also running for office."

Easter Sunday is in theaters today.

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