What if They Made a Dirty Rom-Com About People Who Looked Like Them?

Rozette Rago for The New York Times

The sex scene needed something. A headpiece, they call it in comedy. A funny bit at the start to bridge the emotional gap between the scene that leads up to it — in this case, the sudden death of a beloved character — and the very different scene that follows it: a mutual deflowering in the back seat of a car. A sex scene as American as the pie sex scene in “American Pie.”

Marcus and Sasha are childhood besties who met cute as 10-year-olds a few scenes earlier, and now they’re about to go off to college — she is, anyway — and so it’s time for them to seal the deal. But how to get there?

“Always Be My Maybe,” the movie in question, stars the stand-up comic Ali Wong and the “Fresh Off the Boat” lead Randall Park, old friends in real life who also wrote the film together and then brought in his sitcom’s creator, Nahnatchka Khan, to direct. Those facts alone — a pair of Asian-American stars, an Iranian-American female director — make it something of a unicorn in Hollywood, even in the era of “Crazy Rich Asians” and “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” and to top things off it’s a romantic comedy for grown-ups. Asian-American men rarely get to be the hero in mainstream Hollywood movies, Asian-American women rarely pick the Asian guy at the end, and Asian couples rarely exist onscreen at all, let alone have sex, let alone funny sex.

Continuing reading: What if They Made a Dirty Rom-Com About People Who Looked Like Them?