Randall Park's Small-Town L.A.

The star of Fresh Off the Boat has made an occasionally mortifying coming-of-age film,Always Be My Maybe, inspired by his own life.

- E. Alex Jung

THIS IS THE MALL I lost my virginity at,” Randall Park says as he eases his aqua RAV4 into a spot near the J.C. Penney at the Westfield Culver City. We’re discreetly in the shadow of the Marina Freeway. He leans back and gazes into the distance: It was 1993, and his high-school girlfriend had returned from college just as he was beginning his first year at UCLA. He doesn’t remember if they had planned to do it right there, in the back of his Corolla in a parking lot—just that it would be the first time for both of them and that they had been anticipating this moment for months with the intensity and sincerity of, well, virgins.

“I have letters that we sent to each other building it up, like, ‘This is gonna be so special, and it’s gonna be great,’ ” he says. “And it was just horrible. It didn’t last long. It was clumsy. I remember afterward thinking, It was supposed to be so much more than that. We went to McDonald’s, and the moment that I remember is us just standing there, staring at the menu, and me feeling, Oh my God, I’m a piece of shit.”

Casually offering up personal mortification is just part of Park’s style. That unforgettable moment in his life gets replayed and remixed in Always Be My Maybe, a romantic comedy he co-wrote and stars in with his friend Ali Wong. They play childhood friends Marcus and Sasha, who upset the delicate balance of heterosexual friendship with an awkward, fumbling, pre- college hurrah in the back of Marcus’s—yes— Corolla. After they fight at a Burger King, their relationship goes into a freeze that lasts into adulthood.