Yahoo News Ashley Park on How She Deals with Racism in Hollywood: 'I Realized How Good I Am at Code-Switching'
The 'Joy Ride' actress gets candid about her experience of being 'accommodating' in different spaces — and how it "compromised me as a person"
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Joy Ride, the gleefully raunchy buddy comedy starring Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola and Sabrina Wu as four friends who go on a business trip to Asia that goes gloriously wrong, is not only Emily in Paris star Park's first leading role — it's also the first movie she's been in that is written and directed by Asian women and stars rising Asian talents. And she noticed the difference immediately.
"First of all, Sabrina and Stephanie and Sherry, all of us are so happy and conditioned to be supporting characters," says Park, who is PEOPLE's July digital cover star. "It really did feel like family right off the bat. And there's a certain level of comfort, especially with [writer] Teresa [Hsiao] and [director] Adele [Lim] and [writer] Cherry [Chevapravatdumrong] at the helm."
Park's character Audrey is a high-achieving lawyer who works very hard at assimilating with her mostly white male coworkers in order to advance in her career.
"That's actually why I understand Audrey so well," says Park, who grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the daughter of Korean immigrants. "I want to acknowledge that I'm complicit and completely figuring out a way to be a part of that world. I am Audrey in that way."
"It's an accommodating thing," continues the actress, who got her Broadway break playing Gretchen Wieners in the Mean Girls musical in 2017 and is best known for playing Mindy Chen in Emily in Paris. "It's what people do on a basic level and I did times a thousand to be everybody's safe place. Because I always had a chip on my shoulder of 'Oh well, if that role wasn't supposed to be Asian, I probably would never have gotten it because I wasn't good enough."
Park is honest about how she sometimes modified her behavior in her life and career.
"We code-switch because we're trying to find a way to be indispensable to people, whether as their buddy or confidant," she says. "The reason code-switching really helped me as an actor is because I'm really good at immediately observing what somebody needs and what somebody feels safe with. Not changing myself for that, but because it makes me feel good to be that for them. But that compromised me as a person a lot."
Which is why she felt to comfortable — and confident — on the Joy Ride set. "We talked about it a lot, me and and Adele and Cherry and Teresa. I didn't have to code switch for anyone, and I could just be there as myself. I can be me."
Joy Ride is in theaters July 7.
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