Awkwafina: The unexpected Hollywood star we didn’t know we need

To say that 2018 was a seminal year for Awkwafina would be putting things mildly. Having only been known in certain comedy and music circles until then, she suddenly found herself in the limelight with not one, but two breakthrough movies – Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians. Since then, she’s gone on to become a household name as an actor, creating her own TV show, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, and starring in several blockbusters. Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon, in which she voiced Sisu, were among the quartet of movies she headlined last year.

Indeed, the talented 33-year-old is the very definition of a multi-hyphenate. Actor, comedian, rapper, writer – it seems that everything the New York City native touches turns to gold. But while her life may seem like a fairy tale today, it has been anything but easy…

Grandmotherly Love

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Nora Lum – to give the actress her birth name – was born on 2 June 1988 in New York as the sole child of Wally, a Chinese-American, and Tia, a South Korean painter. Tragically, her mum passed away when she was just four, leaving her father and his parents to raise her. If the story sounds familiar, that’s because it closely mirrors the life of her eponymous character in Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, the hit TV series she created for Comedy Central.

Like her fictional role, Nora spent her formative years in the New York borough, and was particularly close to her paternal grandmother. An early role model, the latter signed her up for singing lessons as a child without her father ever knowing. Speaking of this close relationship, the star explains: “My grandmother is everything to me. She taught me that Asian women are strong. They’re not meek orchard-dwelling figures.”

Losing Home

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Awkwafina in ‘Awkwafina is Nora from Queens’

Her grandparents ran a Chinese restaurant in the Flushing area of Queens, but when it began to fail, they had to file for bankruptcy, losing the business as well as their home. At this point, the entire family was forced to move into a tiny apartment, with Lum sharing the sole bedroom with her grandparents until she turned 12. Recalling these troubled times, she notes: “I remember staying up with my grandma at night and asking her, ‘What is the only thing you wish for that you could have right now?’ And she said, ‘To pay the bills.’”

Troubled Teen

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Athe premiere of Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings

Having been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) as well as depression during her teens, Nora was anything but an A-plus pupil. Despite being accepted into the prestigious Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School – an institution famed for churning out musical talents and thespians such as Al Pacino, Jennifer Aniston and Timothée Chalamet – she was, in her estimation, “a bad kid”. She says she would often skip class to drink or smoke with friends, and would always get caught. Thankfully, she managed to scrape together a C-minus average, eventually graduating and – after learning Mandarin in Beijing – making it to the University of Albany.

Also Read: First Asian superhero in a Marvel movie: Simu Liu as ‘Shang-Chi’

Alter Ego

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Awkwafina wins the Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture: Musical or Comedy category at the Golden Globes

Lum fell in love with music at an early age, learning to play the trumpet when she was in the fifth grade and training in both the jazz and classical traditions. However, it was rap that truly captivated her imagination. She began rapping when she was 13, often recording her own tunes into a boombox mixtape recorder, and three years later picked out her own stage name – Awkwafina.

It wasn’t until Nora was in college, however, that she would fully embrace Awkwafina as her alter ego. Having to temper and filter herself to fit the mould of a ‘proper’ university student, she used that outlandish persona to release the repressed side of her personality. “She’s the girl who’s high on sleepover energy, running around and dunking ice cream cones in her eyes,” shares Lum. “College was like prison reform where I learned to be quiet and more passive – so when Awkwafina comes out on stage, she’s that crazy high-school kid that doesn’t really care about anything. It’s an extra burst of confidence that Nora doesn’t have. There is a duality.”

Bad Rap

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Awkwafina with co-stars Sarah Paulson, Sandra Bullock, Rihanna, and Cate Blanchett in Ocean’s 8

Awkwafina may have been rapping and producing her own songs since her teenage years, but her first big break came in 2012 when My Vag became a viral hit on her YouTube channel. Her song’s success – it garnered over three million views – galvanised her into a frenzy of songwriting, and she followed it with the 12-track Yellow Ranger album in 2014, then In Fina We Trust in 2018. She was featured in the rap documentary Bad Rap, an exposé on four Asian-American hip-hop artists, which debuted at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

Awkward Feelings

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Dolled up for the premiere of Crazy Rich Asians

Having long struggled with depression and her overall mental health, Awkwafina was not shielded from feelings of inadequacy and anxiety when she found fame. Indeed, she points to the summer of that seminal year – 2018 – as being particularly challenging. When Netflix film Dude, Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians were released in a rapid five-month span, the sudden attention and scrutiny caused her to feel displaced.

“That summer, it was a lot of people being like, ‘Just enjoy, dude, just have fun, live in the moment,’” she recalls. “All this stuff started to come up. I wondered at a certain point, when everything in my life was amazing, why I felt so low and with no sense of identity.” Thankfully, she’s now adjusted to her celebrity status.

Farewell Arrival

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Not only has she successfully overcome stereotypes and mental health issues, she’s even made acting history. With her 2020 Golden Globe triumph, she became the first-ever performer of Asian descent to win in the Best Actress category (for her poignant portrayal of Billi in The Farewell).

So what’s next for Lum and her wildly successful alter ego? Well, next month sees the barrier-breaking talent lend her voice to animated film The Bad Guys as Ms Tarantula and then to the part of Scuttle the seagull in the 2023 live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid.

Also Read: Jess Unstopabble: Here’s what you didn’t know about actress Jessica Chastain

(Text: Tenzing Thondup)

‘Gorge’ Washington: Exploring the life and career of Denzel Washington

Few African-American actors have had as storied a career as Denzel Washington. With a success-packed CV stretching back more than 40 years, the much-loved thespian has consistently been celebrated for his engaging, tour-de-force performances, abiding charisma and down-to-earth personality. Indeed, the 66-year-old New York native has forged his own path in the entertainment industry, breaking down stereotypes and proving the dramatic strength and box-office attraction of black male leads time and time again. For his efforts, he’s been showered with countless awards and critical acclaim, with a sterling Hollywood reputation that few of his contemporaries – of any race – could hope to match.

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Despite being in the limelight for decades, the famed actor has been notoriously tight-lipped about his private life. Yet, the man who has found success in bringing the stories of true-life characters to the big screen has had an equally interesting life away from the cameras. From his allegedly misspent youth to his struggle with a higher calling, some of the lesser known facets of Denzel Washington’s life certainly merit exploring…


A Hard Start
The actor’s staggeringly successful career is one that few could have imagined, let alone Washington himself. Born on 28 December, 1954, in Mount Vernon, New York to Denzel Hayes Washington Sr., an ordained Pentecostal minister, and Lennis, a beauty parlour owner, his upbringing was anything but easy. Following his parents’ divorce during his teen years, his strongest memories are of seeing his single mother scramble to put food on the table. Yet, despite the struggles, he still cites his parents as being true role models, saying: “My father was a preacher – a kind, spiritual person. My mother owned a beauty shop. She was a go-getter and wanted more for us kids. My parents were inspirations by example.”

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Flirting with Crime
Growing up on the streets of Mount Vernon, Denzel fell in with a crowd of rambunctious teens and often got into trouble with the law. Recalling this, he says: “I was what they call ‘throwing rocks at the penitentiary’, but I never hit it. I never got caught… but I also knew right from wrong, so I never wanted to go too far.” Nevertheless, his put-upon mother managed to scrape together enough money to get him away from temptation, sending him to boarding school in upstate New York.

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Realistic Portrayals
Since the ’80s, the talented thespian has consistently won widespread critical acclaim for his portrayal of important real-life figures. Most notable among these were 1987’s Cry Freedom, where he played South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, his role as Muslim minister and human rights activist Malcolm X in the eponymous 1992 biopic, football coach Herman Boone in Remember the Titans (2000), and gritty drug kingpin Franc Lucas in 2007’s American Gangster.

gafencu magazine celebrity feature 'Gorge' Washington Exploring the life and career of Denzel Washington
Perfect Beauty
A scientific article, Biological Basis on the Perceptions of Beauty, published in Newsweek during the ’90s, singled out the actor as being a prime example for the “perfection of beauty”. The study, which cited facial symmetry as being a key indicator of attractiveness, pointed to his perfectly centred nose, aligned eyes, lips and ears as modelling the highest standards of facial beauty.

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Award Winner
Across his 40-odd-year career, Washington has accumulated a whole host of accolades for a variety of roles. Key among these are two Academy Awards (he was the first African-American to be accorded such an honour), three Golden Globes, a Tony Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2016, he was even the recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award from the Golden Globes jury for his “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment”.

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Director’s Chair
After decades of starring on the silver screen, in 2002, he stepped behind the cameras for the first time and made his directorial debut with the highly-biographical film Antwone Fisher. Five years later, he returned to the director’s chair for another biographical movie, The Great Debaters. After a long hiatus, 2017 saw him star and direct in a third film, Fences, which went on to be nominated for Best Picture at that year’s Academy Awards.

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Prophesy Fulfilled
While the Training Day star was a struggling 20-year-old student at Fordham University, he had his fortune told at his mother’s beauty salon. A customer there scribbled a note that said: “You’re going to speak to millions of people. You’re going to do great things” and handed it to him. Though sceptical at the time, his fortunes changed and he still has that piece of paper today.

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Family Man
Standing in stark contrast with the oft-lurid personal lives of Hollywood’s elite, Washington’s home life is refreshingly normal, something that he sees as a point of pride. In fact, he’s even been quoted as saying: “Acting is just a way of making a living, but family is life.” He’s been married to wife Pauletta, whom he met on the set of the TV film Wilma, for an amazing 37 years. Together, the couple have four children.

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Preacher, Preacher
The Hollywood A-lister has never been shy when it comes to sharing his strong belief in the Christian faith and championing how it has positively impacted on every aspect of his life. What is less known, though, is that at one point, he considered foregoing acting to become a preacher, even going so far as to ask his pastor about how to make the change. Though he ultimately decided to remain an actor, motivational speaking has also become a big thing for him over recent years. Explaining why, he says: “I’ve always understood that I’ve been blessed to be put in this situation and I’m more than happy to take advantage of it and preach, if you will, about what God has done in my life.”


Black Panther Maker
A true believer in giving back to the community, the actor has a long history of donating funds to a range of causes, including college scholarship funds for black youths. One of the students he sponsored, unbeknownst to him, was the late Black Panther star, Chadwick Boseman. At the 47th AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony celebrating the venerable star, the younger actor even went so far as to say: “There is no Black Panther without Denzel Washington.”