Henry Golding's first dream was to cut hair like nobody's business. His goals: “work in London, be a notorious and famous hairdresser and such,” he says. “And that's what I did.” At 16, Golding dropped out of school to work at a salon, later moving to London to work at the salon of royalty shearer Richard Ward. The transition, like many things for Golding, was easy, natural.

Then one day, in the steamy reverie of his morning shower, he was struck by another itch: to move to Kuala Lumpur and start a new life as a TV show presenter. So he bailed on the salon to break into Malaysian TV with zero experience, armed with a demo reel he made himself. In the video, which he sheepishly showed me on his phone, a gangly 21-year-old Golding hosts a fake travel show, touring Brick Lane in London. The clip is endearingly earnest, and Golding is clearly a natural—yet he can watch only a few minutes of his younger self before bashfully turning it off. (“Look at my arms!” Golding squawks. “Pointing and shit! So bad!”)

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Somehow the gambit worked—he got the job. Golding's life blossomed into a peripatetic fantasy: a brief stint at ESPN, then three years trekking through the beaches, jungles, and streets of Asia and New Zealand as a travel host for BBC and Discovery Channel Asia.

A decade later, 30-year-old Golding would, for a third time, drop everything to pursue another dream—the one that's landed him on the cover of GQ for his Hollywood arrival in Crazy Rich Asians. He was discovered not by a casting director but by an accountant working in the film's Malaysian production office. She mentioned Golding to director Jon M. Chu, who then Googled Golding, watched all his Instagram and YouTube videos, and got in touch through a mutual Facebook friend. Golding had never acted before, at least not professionally, and had to interrupt his honeymoon for an audition.

You know how the rest goes: Crazy Rich Asians broke box-office records as the biggest rom-com in a decade, proof that people have been thirsting for Asian-American stories from a film industry bereft of them. Even if it is just one movie, Crazy Rich Asians is hopefully a harbinger of more representation in Hollywood (or, at the very least, Crazy Rich Asians 2). And as for Golding, he's a handsome face you'll be seeing more and more of. This fall he made out with Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick in A Simple Favor, and he wrapped Monsoon, an indie movie about a gay British-Vietnamese refugee returning his parents' ashes home. Next year he stars in a Guy Ritchie gangster movie, Toff Guys, and the holiday movie Last Christmas.