The cast and crew of ‘Forge’ share why Asians would make great criminals
Director Jing Ai Ng and actors Kelly Marie Tran, Brandon Soo Hoo, and Andie Ju on their new film, Miami and the world of art crime
From left, Andie Ju and Brandon Soo Hoo as Coco and Raymond Zhang, respectively, in "Forge."
Courtesy of SXSW
Words by Zachary Lee
A love letter to the sprawling diasporas within Miami and an insightful glance into the world of white-collar art crime, director Jing Ai Ng’s Forge educates even as it thrills. On the surface, it coasts with an easygoing and free-flowing rhythm, nestling its narrative amidst typical scenes one might associate with films set in the Magic City (Nightclub sequence? Check. Sleek cars? Pick your vehicular poison). Yet, like its protagonists, siblings Coco (Andie Ju) and Raymond (Brandon Soo Hoo) Zhang, Forge—which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival and is currently seeking distribution—is much more mercurial, the flamboyant mise-en-scène acting as a sleight of hand for its ruminations around familial shame around taboo vocations and how imitation is the sincerest form of affection.
We first meet Coco and Raymond after they've successfully scammed an unsuspecting white art dealer into buying a painting that Coco has masterfully forged. Eager to level up their scores, they go into business with Holden (Edmund Donovan), a trust fund kid who enlists them to remake his grandfather’s entire art collection that has been damaged due to a hurricane. Meanwhile, FBI art crimes agent Emily Lee (Kelly Marie Tran), who has recently moved to Miami, meets the Zhangs’ mother at their family restaurant as Emily begins to investigate a slew of local art forgeries (read: clients who realize they've been tricked by Coco and Raymond) her work brings her closer and closer to the Zhangs’ latest scheme.
"Forge" premiered at the SXSW Film Festival and is currently seeking distribution.
Poster for "Forge"
I recently spoke with Tran, Soo Hoo, Ng, and Ju. We discussed the on-screen sibling dynamic, the importance (and significance) of shooting on location in Miami, and why Asians would be the best criminals.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Zachary Lee: Jing, I read that this script was originally set in New York before the swap was made to Miami. Can you talk more about that shift?
Jing Ai Ng: I love a good crime movie, but I wanted to make it more personal. Setting it in my hometown certainly accomplished that and also helped give the city its own personality. The tropical setting makes it stand out and since Miami is a city of hustlers, it makes the film more spicy in a weird way. Miami is not a place with an easy tax incentive so we didn’t use one. But it was important for us to film there and we filmed 100 percent of the film there.
ZL: The restaurant in the film, Tropical Chinese, also holds significance right?
JAN: [Laughs.] Yeah, Tropical Chinese has been there since the 80s. I grew up eating there as a kid. The owner thought the script was super funny and allowed us to use the name and location even though he’s not an art forger.
ZL: Kelly, I learned so much not just about the world of art forgery but through your character, the role the FBI plays in that. How familiar were you with those aspects of the job before taking on this role?
Kelly Marie Tran: [Laughs.] I definitely did not know. I did go down a lot of YouTube Internet rabbit holes about women in the FBI, but one of the things Jing and I talked about a lot was wanting Emily to be someone who was a real working person. The art crimes work is not a department of the FBI that is well funded at all. Emily is a woman who is trying to prove herself in an environment where she's the only Asian woman. You can tell that in her appearance too; she's wearing clothes that are too big for her, but she's good at what she does.
Emily is a character who turns to her work whenever she doesn't want to address the fact that she's really f*cking lonely and she doesn't have her family in Miami. In the past, I’ve very much become a workaholic to hide all of these other parts of my life that I was afraid to address. I’m grateful Jing wrote such a nuanced character and that we got to bring her to life together.
ZL: From Control Freak to The Wedding Banquet to Forge, this is the year of Kelly Marie Tran. Have you thought about a through line of these projects?
KMT: It's always been really important to me to make sure that I am thinking about these sort of meta questions about representation, about the opportunities that Asian people are afforded and not afforded. I’m grateful that this year I've been able to be part of different projects that portray, I think, very authentic Asian stories but they’re all across different genres. It’s been my dream to be able to be an actor that plays in different genres, which is not a privilege that's afforded to many women or many women of color.
ZL: Andie, similarly for you, with projects like Beef, The Greatest Hits, and now Forge, you've been a part of projects that showcase the diversity and breadth of the Asian American experience. Can you speak to the significance of being involved in projects like these?
Andie Ju: It's hard to surmise into words how meaningful it has been to me—it's been such an honor to have been a part of these projects in any way. I am very proud to have been able to tell these stories because they not only showcase and highlight the Asian American experience, but also go beyond that and depict very human experiences that many different people can relate to. Being able to represent my community in this way is something that I take great pride in, and is also very humbling—it is a large community and there are so many stories out there to tell. I hope that I get to continue to be a part of meaningful projects with narratives that uplift and highlight the human experience in a way that resonates with viewers and connects people from all over.
ZL: I love the dynamic you and Brandon have in the film. Could you speak a bit about building and fleshing out the sibling dynamic between your characters?
AJ: Brandon is such a joy to be around, it was so easy to feel connected to him and see him as my older brother. He has a lot of experience and is very caring, so it was really easy for me to feel comfortable around him and lean on him as a younger sibling would with their older brother. Right from the chem read, I think the sibling bond was very palpable. This is a huge testament to our casting director, Damian Bao, and Jing, our amazing director—I think everyone in the room could feel the sibling dynamic right away. Brandon, like Raymond, is charismatic and loveable. His being so giving allowed me to open up and be comfortable on set and I felt, and still feel, very grateful to have gone through this experience with him.
Brandon Soo Hoo: I echo Andie’s sentiment. I had chemistry readings with a couple of different actors, and honestly, my chemistry read with Andie was the one that I felt the closest to actually being my sister. It wasn’t too hard for us to make that sibling dynamic and it’s refreshing because you usually don’t see Asian American sibling-ship on screen in this nuanced way.
ZL: I loved the sequence where Coco talks about paying attention and her creating forgeries is a way she shows love and reverence to the original artists. Jing, is that an idea that you’ve been noodling on for a bit?
JAN: If we're talking just about the fine art market, how do you value art? Is it by how many people look at it? Because that's not the price, right? How you put a price tag on art is something I think about all the time. In that scene, where she’s talking about her love for art, it's strange because, in one way, art can be seen as a way to hold value and make money. Yet in another sense, art is so pure, and she has this love for it. So I wanted to capture how complicated that is and how impossible it seems to kind of reconcile those two things.
ZL: Andie and Brandon, as actors, I’m curious about how that monologue first landed for you and how you think about Coco’s claim about different forms of art, such as movie making?
AJ: This monologue was one of the many, many brilliant things in Jing's script. I resonate with this sentiment very deeply. For me personally, as an actor, I have to love my characters and know them very deeply to have enough conviction to play them. When making a movie, there are so many pieces and moving parts to creating it—you have to put in a lot of attention and care and have a strong vision for what it is you want to create. I got to see this up close while shooting Forge and saw firsthand how much Jing and the producers, Gabrielle Cordero, Liz Daering-Glass, Damian Bao, and Dave Liu, put into every shoot day with managing many different departments and factors. The whole cast and crew came together and I believe it's because we all loved the script and the project, and wanted to do everything we could to bring it to life in the way that we believed it deserved to be.
BSH: I found it fascinating that my character was in white-collar crime. Raymond is someone who cares about making his parents proud. What I loved was that Jing did a good job of subverting the expectations of that desire. Raymond may not have been the standard good student or well-to-do citizen, but he was running a crime enterprise at the highest level. To run something like that requires entrepreneurship and business skills. He’s competent. The film shows a lot of details about the actual process of forging artwork.
ZL: I was going to say, those scenes almost felt like a tutorial.
BSH: [Laughs.] I hope we don’t inspire too many criminals. But it’s interesting to think that the same level of meticulousness that Asian Americans put into their homework, into their testing, into their studies, they put that same level of effort into the crime. Those skills that are valued are just deployed differently.
ZL: The discipline is there, it may just not be in the vocation that mom wanted.
BSH: Exactly. Coco and Raymond are still hardworking. They still studied and dotted their “i’s” and crossed their “t’s.” Ironically, while Coco and Raymond are shattering the stereotypes of what it means to be Asian because they’re in the art forgery crime, they were in some ways living into those stereotypes because they were using that same work ethic [Laughs]. The siblings still have that critical lens towards their work. They wrestle with perfectionism because they’re like, “Oh it’s still not good enough. The forgery could be better.”
ZL: Imagine if all Asians were criminals. Our work ethic would be undefeated.
BSH: [Laughs.] We’d be too good. We’d take over the world.
Published on April 23, 2025
Words by Zachary Lee
Zachary Lee is a freelance film and culture writer based in Chicago. You can read his work at places like RogerEbert, The Chicago Reader, Dread Central, Sojourners, and The National Catholic Reporter. He frequently writes about the intersection between popular culture and spirituality. Find him hopelessly attempting to catch up on his watchlist over on Letterboxd.