Even the film’s biggest set piece is a sly celebration of Asian American identity. Keanu Reeves swans into the film for a scene-stealing sequence in which he plays a heightened version of himself who competes with Marcus for Sasha’s affections and delivers nonsensical one-liners. (“The only stars that matter are the ones you see when you dream,” he purrs to Marcus’s girlfriend.) But Reeves wasn’t chosen just because he’s an A-lister with a popular franchise in the zeitgeist. “We thought, Who would be Marcus’s worst nightmare? It should be an Asian American icon who’s a great actor and who’s funny but also willing to make fun of himself,” Wong said. “[Keanu] was flattered that we remembered he was Asian American.”

While the gag had always been in the script, Khan enhanced its absurdity. “In our heads, it was, Keanu’s going to walk in, and that’s gonna be magical,” Park said, “but she took that and really made it dreamlike and surreal.” In Khan’s hands, time almost stops as Reeves enters (in a moment that’s already been GIFed to oblivion) and Marcus’s face falls in slow motion.

Then again, Khan knew how to deploy the celebrity-as-himself-but-worse trick. She’d used it on Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 with James Van Der Beek to hilarious effect: The joke played with the actor’s Dawson’s Creek legacy to comment astutely on celebrity. With Reeves, Khan does the same—and she didn’t stop there when it came to bringing her stamp to Always Be My Maybe. On set, she liked to cross-shoot, pointing cameras at both leads at the same time so they’d capture on-the-fly jokes as they came rather than resetting and re-creating them to complete the shot. And every night, Khan would mark up the next day’s shooting pages with alternative jokes and leave room for her stars to improv—a strategy she’d used while writing and directing TV episodes. “It frees you up as a writer to not have to craft the one perfect joke, and then you also have the improv capability,” she said. “Like, you have Ali and Randall. You have two racehorses. You’ve got to let them run!”

Together, they’ve created a film that challenges rom-com norms not by reinventing the genre wholesale, but by complementing its most timeless elements with the minute details of a world rarely seen on-screen. To Wong, Always Be My Maybe works not only because she, Park, and Khan know that world intimately, but also because they understand one another’s sensibilities. “With comedy, it’s so much about trust and communication,” Wong told me. “You don’t want to be on a comedy movie set and get into a screaming match with somebody because you don’t trust that what they’re suggesting is a good idea … [Randall and I] both have a huge amount of respect [for Nahnatchka], but also, we’re friends with her. Sometimes I panic when I think about, like, if I don’t have a project with her coming up.” Wong will just have to snatch her up for whatever comes next.

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