Represent!

Being Constance Wu.

- Jiayang Fan

The mid-July sun at Waialua, on the north shore of Oahu, was already so unforgiving at 9 a.m. that the ice in a cooler of LaCroix near the foot of Constance Wu’s chair had all but melted; an assistant heaped up the few remaining cubes around the cans. It was the first day of principal photography on the movie “I Was a Simple Man,” an intergenerational family drama set partly in nineteen-fifties Hawaii, and Wu was being readied for continuity photos of her character, Grace, an ethnically Chinese woman whose family has lived in Hawaii for generations. Wu wore a floral dress with swirls of turquoise, and a waxy white orchid was about to be pinned behind her ear. When the stylist, a genial man whose beard and burly physique gave him the air of a tropical Santa, imparted a gentle wave to her hair, she yelped and winced repeatedly, convinced that she’d been burned. He assured her that what she felt was just freshly curled strips of hair brushing her skin. Wu kept close watch in the mirror as the makeup artist, a woman with wrist tattoos named Jordann, worked on her face. Eventually, Wu cocked her head, grimaced, and said, “I feel like you are making me look too pretty.”

Wu cast around for an example of what she was hoping for. “Like, you know how Brie Larson looked in ‘Short Term 12’?” Jordann hadn’t seen the movie. “Elsie Fisher in ‘Eighth Grade’?” A sorry shake of the head. Appraising her face once more, Wu said, “I mean, I feel like I’m at a magazine shoot, but I’m not sure I feel like the character.”

Jordann explained that the film’s writer and director, Chris Yogi, had shown her a video of an actress wearing the look he envisaged for Wu’s character. “He’s a guy,” Wu said, conspiratorially. “He probably liked it because he thought the girl was hot.”