Make Them LAUGH

Filipino American comedian Jo Koy has not only brought laughter to the world but pride to his motherland. He gets candid about critics, representation and blurring cultural boundaries

- Christine Andas. 

As the video call connects, I hear a faint “Hello!” from, I assume, the actor I am scheduled to interview: Jo Koy. As a big fan, I couldn’t suppress my excitement and, although there is nobody yet on screen, I immediately greet him by his name. The voice responds, “No, this isn’t Jo, this is Josh,” before introducing me to the comedian, whose laugh I now hear in the background.

When the actor’s camera is turned on, he’s sitting there wearing a plain white shirt and LA Dodgers cap, fresh from the Tatler photo shoot at Filbert Kung’s studio in Beverly Hills. Behind him is a display for Easter Sunday, the first Filipino-themed film produced and globally released by a major Hollywood studio. The comedy features an almost all-Filipino cast, including Jo Koy, who had pitched the movie to Steven Spielberg’s company Amblin Entertainment.

He admits he wasn’t expecting much when he met with people from Amblin Entertainment at Universal Studios.

“I thought it was a general meeting: I’ll tell them about me, they’ll tell me about them, and then we’ll walk away,” he recalls. “But the minute we walked in, people greeted me like ‘Oh my god, Steven’s a big fan’, ‘Steven loves you’, ‘Steven can’t stop talking about your special.’ And I keep telling this joke to everybody, but I honestly was like, ‘Do you mean Steven from accounting? Because there’s no way it’s Steven Spielberg. It’s absolutely impossible!’ And they were like, ‘No, it’s Steven Spielberg; he wants to make a movie with you’.”

It turns out Spielberg had seen his Netflix special Jo Koy: Coming In Hot, and wanted to bring the actor’s story to the big screen.