Thread by @latimesent

When @CrazyRichMovie opens Wednesday, it'll mark the 1st studio film in 25 years to tell a contemporary story centered on an all-Asian cast.

Here, the cast & creators discuss their own crazy, diverse journeys to Hollywood & the significance of this moment lat.ms/2MAARsN

Actors @KenJeong, @ConstanceWu, @Gemma_Chan & more on their roads to the big screen: "My dad said to me, it doesn't matter how good you are or how talented you are — how many faces do you see on the screen that look like ours?"

Watch more here: lat.ms/2MAARsN

Only 4.8% of the top 100 films of 2017 featured a character of Asian descent with a speaking role, according to an Annenberg study. @CrazyRichMovie hopes to change that

Actor @KenJeong on @CrazyRichMovie: "The movie's bigger than all of us ... I don't think I've ever felt this way"

The leading lady of @CrazyRichMovie, @ConstanceWu, recently broke ground on the small screen. She was cast in @FreshOffABC, the first network show in 20 years to be centered on an Asian-American family experience lat.ms/2P0vjcX

For star @HenryGolding, @CrazyRichMovie was his first audition ever — and he was pulled 4 days into his honeymoon for a final read 😮 lat.ms/2vyAI2F

Actor @HenryGolding isn't the only @CrazyRichMovie star with a crazy audition story. Watch @KenJeong, @NicoSantos and more laugh off some from the past, including accidental "jazz hands" for an "American Sniper" role 😅

Director @JonMChu says he was drawn to @CrazyRichMovie to tackle something "more personal, and the most personal thing was tackling my own cultural identity. Something I was too scared to deal with before" lat.ms/2MbSEdR

The author of "Crazy Rich Asians," @KevinKwanBooks, on why this means so much to him: "The last 30 years of my life have been about struggling towards expressing my creativity...So for me, the most important thing is to creatively inspire a new generation to break out of the box"

Chris Pang says he was "the annoying guy" selling phones to businesses when he landed his first job in Hollywood, a gig he may have turned down in hindsight lat.ms/2MgzHpC

Actor @RonnyChieng says he did "a very Hollywood thing" to land a role in @CrazyRichMovie lat.ms/2MBv6v3 👀

Writer @AdeleBLim pulled from her childhood experiences to adapt #CrazyRichAsians & took it seriously: "Important doesn't begin to describe it—when you're talking about describing a culture and a family, you want it to come from an authentic perspective" lat.ms/2KLdrzf

Jimmy O. Yang (@FunnyAsianDude) says the cast, despite being from different parts of the world, bonded over the way they were raised: "We all came from families that probably wish maybe we would have done something else" lat.ms/2KHY7n9

Actress @Gemma_Chan actually auditioned for drama school in secret, only telling her family once she got in lat.ms/2MiQgks

Michelle Yeoh, who considers the James Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies" and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” as standouts in her 3-decade long career, says she's "waited a very long time" for a film like @CrazyRichMovie lat.ms/2B1hsjj

Actor @NicoSantos on @CrazyRichMovie: "I just love the fact that this movie is about the Asian experience but there's nobody doing martial arts in this movie. There's nobody fleeing villages. We just get to be really awesome people" lat.ms/2M6LPtY

"Crazy Rich Asians" star @Awkwafina says the film made her feel "the power, the privilege, of having representation in a country where you grew up" lat.ms/2OYmT5H

Sonoya Mizuno: "I feel privileged to be in this position to help push this moment forward. But also, I feel like this film is just the beginning of something greater" lat.ms/2vWzUDX

Check out more interviews and photography of the @CrazyRichMovie cast and crew, before the film hits theaters Wednesday: lat.ms/2MAARsN 📸: @MelMelconPhoto