Constance Wu on 'Crazy Rich Asians'

There has been one Asian-American woman, in the history of television, to be nominated for an Emmy as a lead actress in a drama. That happened this year, when Sandra Oh received a nod for the BBC’s Killing Eve. In the history of movies, there has been one Academy Award–winning best actor of Asian descent: Ben Kingsley, who is British and part Indian, for 1982’s Gandhi. The only woman of Asian descent nominated for best actress, Merle Oberon (part Indian and Maori), did not win for The Dark Angel, a movie that was made more than 80 years ago.

noted those odds growing up in Virginia as the daughter of two Taiwanese immigrants. For years, Lucy Liu, on the series and in numerous films, and Oh, who starred for 10 seasons on  have been among the few Asian-American women in. Now, she’s starring in (opening ), the first major Hollywood film with all Asian American and Asian British leads in 25 years, since 1993’s . It’s also, as Allyson Chiu noted in , “an entire movie about Asians without martial arts and stereotypical nerds.”