Lana Condor says the Asian community doesn't 'get Cinderella moments a lot' onscreen

Condor says one scene in the new To All The Boys I've Loved Before sequel was particularly important to her 
Getty Images
Megan C. Hills5 February 2020

Lana Condor is back to reprise the role of Lara Jean in the sequel to To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the Vietnamese-American actress said the film was a chance for her to “represent our community” as a “space for Asian Americans” - adding that she had never seen a “Cinderella moment where the girl looked like me.”

Condor plays a Korean-American teenager in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before called Lara Jean, who in the first film finds out that all of her secret love letters have been mailed out to several boys she once had a crush on.

The sequel continues on the same premise, as Lara Jean is forced to deal with the continued fallout from the letters (including a new boy called Johnny Ambrose) as she and her boyfriend Peter Kavinsky navigate their relationship.

Condor said one scene was "important" to her, “where Lara Jean is in this beautiful, almost Cinderella gown and she walks down the stairs to Johnny Ambrose. I was waiting on top of the stairs right before we started rolling and it hit me all at once how special that moment was because we don’t get Cinderella moments a lot.”

“As a young girl, I never got to see a Cinderella moment where the girl looked like me. This is the most important part of the story for me is being able to represent our community. It’s creating a space for Asian Americans to tell their story and have a moment,” she continued.

Constance Wu in Crazy Rich Asians
AP

Crazy Rich Asians is perhaps the only other recent film to feature an Asian American woman in a “Cinderella moment”, as Constance Wu wears a pale blue Marchesa gown in a pivotal moment for her character.

The dress is now a part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and director Jon M. Chu told the Los Angeles Times the gown became “literally a fairy-tale dress for people”.

Condor has previously spoken about the lack of representation in Hollywood, saying she felt that the “industry is feeling it” in an interview with WhoWhatWear.

Speaking about the struggle she told Teen Vogue, “My best guess is that Hollywood felt that they could get away with it. That they could cast the funny Asian to be, say, comedic relief, as a supporter. Or cast the smart Asian as a supporting lead. And that was enough.”

Lana Condor and Noah Centineo
Getty Images

“I could get into this, but there's this whole Hollywood casting white people and trying to 'turn them' Asian because, they thought they could get away with it. Now they can't because our generation is very direct and more people are standing up for representation. I do see a change in Hollywood. I see a shift,” she said.

Author Jenny Han, who wrote the books the films are based on, explained that the first novel in the series was “the first young adult book to have an Asian person on the cover on the New York Times Bestseller List”.

After the film came out, fans began to dress as Lana Condor for Halloween and Han said, “There’s a little something in the first book about how Lara Jean never has anything to dress up as for Halloween, and that’s something from my life. So it’s cool to see all these young Asian American women own the moment.”

In a rare move for Netflix, the streaming service shared an insight into its data and said in October 2018 that To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before was “one of its most-viewed original films ever.”

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