Joy Ride Director Adele Lim Reveals Why The Cast Is Perfect

Joy Ride Director Adele Lim reveals inspiration behind Joy Ride, deleted scenes that she loves, and why the cast was so perfect for their roles.

Joy Ride is a raunchy buddy comedy that follows four friends as they go on a journey of self discovery and sexual exploits. When Audrey goes on a business trip to Asia, she needs her friends by her side as it all goes wrong. At the same time, she finds out much more about her biological family than she ever expected to.

Joy Ride Director Adele Lim Reveals Why The Cast Is Perfect

Note: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Joy Ride would not exist without the labor of the writers and actors in both unions.

Director Adele Lim, who helped to write the film with a couple of her real life friends, caught up with Mama’s Geeky to discuss Joy Ride. She reveals the films that they took inpsiration from when putting it all together, details of the K-Pop scene, why the cast is so perfect for their roles, and even deleted scenes.

What Movies Inspired Joy Ride?

Adele Lim: The three major films that were our influences moving into this is Girls Trip, The Hangover, and Bridesmaids. Hangover for the vibe and the joy of it. Like you just were so excited to go to the movies and just like laugh your ass off. But with Girls Trip and Bridesmaids, it just hit on a thing that was so close to home for my friends and I, which was it’s something you take for granted in your 20s, but then when you move into the insanity that is your 30s, finding yourself career wise and you’re building your family, etc. The things that got us through all those periods where our close female friendships.

Those are those can be really loaded proposition sometimes, but at the end of the day, you’re there with each other. Also that that sense of identity and belonging, where you’re just like who am I. I used to be a certain energy post graduation in our 20s but now I’m finding myself professionally, I’m finding myself who I am in all these different spaces.

Adele Lim: I think we always went back to the theme of, if you find your people then your home. If you find your people, you have your strength. You belong. We didn’t see or have a lot of movies that celebrated that female friendship. My best experience as we’re going to those movies, like going to Magic Mike, when I was just seven or eight months pregnant, completely inappropriate. And me and my girlfriends and in a theater full of gay guys just literally throwing money at the  screen. That feeling like oh my god, I needed this. I needed this in my life.

The K-Pop Scene Details

Adele Lim: One of my favorite scenes is the K-Pop moment. It’s an insane wish fulfillment for us. At this point, I feel like most women and gay men have had a fantasy of being in a K-Pop group, because why not? So we built it into our movie. It was our four actors, who had recorded the song and had done all this choreography, and then being able to shoot it on set and seeing it all come together. I remember shooting it and looking at our filmmakers going like oh my god, we just created a K-Pop sensation. It happens when the characters are in such a garbage point of their journey, that just being able to let loose and have the time of your lives in a purple hair wig. That’s the space I feel like we all secretly want to be in. 

Do You Have A Favorite Joy Ride Deleted Scene?

Adele Lim: There was a scene with Lola and Audrey in this little guesthouse and they’re getting high, just smoking weed. But fun fact, those actors don’t actually do drugs so we had to coach them on how to light a bong. Ashely Park was full on like trying to suck the part where you put the weed and I’m just like, no, we don’t suck there. We have all these jokes, but we actually have all these alt jokes, too. So we have a big tent of writers and they keep throwing out extra jokes because you don’t know what works the best. Between all these extra jokes coming in, the smoke filled like a hot box of a room, and Sherry Cole just nonstop going at it with Ashley, they genuinely crack each other up. They could not keep a straight face through half the jokes and this place is filling up with smoke. One of my camera people has asthma, like we got to get out of here. Let’s try to maintain some semblance of professionalism here.

Why The Joy Ride Cast Is Perfect

Adele Lim: We wrote the characters a certain way, but they really didn’t come to life until we had our actors cast, and they informed our characters. We got to know them, our writers got to know them. We started working a lot of their own personality into the characters. I think that’s when the magic really happens, because on the page, you’ll write a character like, Oh, she’s the good girl who has something to prove.

When I got to know Ashley Park more, for those of you who do know her, she is an amazing Broadway star – Tony nominated. She had this insane performance on Mean Girls. But she came up as this Korean American actor in Ann Arbor, in a space that didn’t have a lot of other Asian faces. And when you grew up being the minority kid or the Asian kid, I think what sometimes people don’t understand is that it’s not just about being a good looking person with acting talent, you have to grow up in a world that never looked at you as the lead of their school play, or the hot girl. So then being able to get to the point where you have enough confidence to be able to be looked at as the star of it, of a major Hollywood movie, that takes a big leap, and Ashley Park has all of that.

Adele Lim: It’s amazing. The other side of it is being able to use all her personal damage, which she openly talks about, I’m not talking out of school here. About being this young woman in this space that was not built for you, that does not look like you, and trying to find your space in it. I would use all her experience and put that into the character of Audrey, which is this try hard lawyer, young woman who’s kind of lost inside a little bit.

Sherry Cola, who plays Lolo, to me, there’s almost no line of demarcation between Lola the character and Sherry Cola the actor. She is 100% like that best friend we either have or wish we had, who’s just out of control. Who always brings a ray of sunshine in your life, but also you’re just like, I can’t bring her around my family sometimes because it’s just too much and she lives too close to the edge. She’s in every scene just nonstop cracking up. She makes the crew crack up. 

Enjoy this movie at home when Joy Ride arrives on Premium Video on Demand July 28th from Lionsgate.

NEXT: Joy Ride Review