The Malaysian stand-up and The Daily Show correspondent on reliving his university days on the sitcom International Student, and making his movie debut in Crazy Rich Asians.
RONNY CHIENG: [When I started out in standup,] I didn’t really have any idea where I was going with it. I was just trying to make people in a room laugh, so it wasn’t like I had a grand plan to do a TV show someday. What happened was that I was doing pretty well as a stand-up in Australia, and then ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] approached me to do a TV show. But I had no experience in making television. One of the rules I knew about television was that you want to tell stories only you can tell. In other words: try to make a TV show where I am irreplaceable, so I can’t get fired (laughs). The only story I felt I could tell and hadn’t been told yet was that of Asian students studying overseas and telling it from their perspectives.
You studied Law at Melbourne University. What was your first day on campus like? Awash with awkwardness like the rest of us?
That’s the cool thing about the story, right? We all went through [that phase] of awkwardness, and I hope that translated on the show. It’s a moment that you had, I had, and we had. So one of the messages in the show is that being uncomfortable with yourself at that age is very normal. So for those of us who are well past that age, we can look back and go, “Yeah, we can remember that time.” And for people who are currently in university, they can look at that and be like, “Oh yeah, it’s normal to be awkward, weird, and all that stuff.”
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