“I can turn on the douche factor very easily,” Ronny Chieng tells me, sipping a latte. “I can be a huge dick.” And despite his J.Crew business-casual attire and calm demeanor, I believe him. Sort of. I mean, he does play Eddie Chang, biggest prick in Singapore, in this year’s most anticipated rom-com, Crazy Rich Asians. But when asked about his rapid-fire success over the past two years, Chieng becomes the exact opposite of a douche, saying it’s due to him just “doing dope shit, like Kanye used to.” He’s feeling himself, but he doesn’t “really dwell on it...the implication of being in awe of yourself.”

The urge is to continue to do dope shit, or follow the path of his favorite football team (“I’m kinda like the New England Patriots. I just kinda do it and then move on”). And even though I personally have no idea how Chieng’s success is tied to Tom Brady, I can see that the mental association is working. The morning we have coffee, at a place he calls “New York’s Secret Garden,” Chieng’s television show, Ronny Chieng: International Student, is premiering in America; he’s only two days away from the Crazy Rich Asians premiere (his American cinematic debut); and he’s about to head to work on The Daily Show, where he serves as senior correspondent.

Born in Malaysia, raised in Singapore and New Hampshire, and holding a degree from the University of Melbourne, Chieng knew that he had a specific skill for storytelling, and comedy, that very few people had. “My final year of law school was when I started, 'cause I thought I could do it.” So, in an effort to “confirm” that he was truly funny, and despite resistance from his law-school peers, he tried stand-up for the first time in 2009. “They told me not to do it. They said, ‘Don't do it. It's gonna be terrible.’ ” Four award-nominated and -winning comedy specials later, Chieng realized that his experiment was turning out very well.

Alamy

By 2015, he was headed to New York City to work on Trevor Noah’s Daily Show, and luckily, like the Patriots, Chieng was able to find his own Bill Belichick before his first day on the job: John Oliver. He knew John would be an amazing asset, because he, too, was a non-American doing comedy on an American political show. “One of the things he said was it took him two years to re-learn how to do comedy in America. And he was spot on to the day, two years.” That re-learning has a lot to do with knowing when the audience will call you on your shit. “You can be a headliner from another country and come to America, and you can kill it for like five minutes, ten minutes. You can even kill it for 45 minutes, an hour, but you're kinda playing the foreigner card. After about six to nine months, the audiences, I think they start to smell the bullshit of like, ‘Oh, you're not the foreigner. You live here now.’ ”

Just when Chieng finally re-learned comedy, work took him back to Singapore. But it was obviously worth it. For him, Crazy Rich Asians was a film he had to be a part of. The story was his. When he was growing up in Singapore, there were legit “cars in the living rooms” of his friends’ homes, which had elevators that opened up right in their apartment buildings. He’s been exposed to the uber-elite of Singapore, done the intercontinental schooling. “I know these people,” Chieng says. “I was around these people for a long time. Accent-wise, I know how to do it, and character-wise, I know how to play the aggressive dude.”

The douche factor?

“You know, that's one of the few guys I can play pretty well: the aggressive banker guy.”

And Chieng jumped at the opportunity to prove that Asia was more than a blockbuster pit stop. “Usually, when Hollywood goes to Asia, it's ’cause James Bond is going there to sleep with someone for one night and then he leaves the next day.” With Crazy Rich Asians, “Singapore is a character.” A non-CGI one, too! Chieng makes it clear that the massive ship sitting atop a series of buildings in the city is real, as are the “UFO trees” during the wedding scene. It’s not movie magic, it’s Singapore magic. It’s the kind of magic that makes Ronny proud just to have shot a really amazing film. “Forget the diversity angle. I feel this is a good movie...I'm proud, I'll put my name behind this any day of the week.” That’s pretty dope shit, right?