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Stephanie Hsu, Oscar nominee and rising Hollywood star, playing a hugely popular Chinese soap star? She couldn't see it at first, actually.

The Everything Everywhere All at Once and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel star plays Kat, a sexually liberated actress, in Joy Ride, Adele Lim's R-rated romp centered on four Asian American pals who embark on a wild trek across Asia. Ashley Park leads the ensemble as Audrey, a successful attorney and adoptee who travels to China on business. Joined by her childhood best friend Lolo (Sherry Cola), former college roommate Kat, and Lolo's eccentric cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), Audrey decides to track down her birth mother — but the plan goes off the rails when they find themselves aboard a train with a drug smuggler.

During EW's Around the Table with the cast (above), Hsu shares that she initially read for the role of Lolo, and though she did not get it, the filmmakers wanted to figure out a way to incorporate her into the core group of pals. Enter: Kat, a persona that Hsu at first struggled to connect with it.

"The role of Kat was like, she's a TV star and she's beautiful and engaged, and the idea of who plays that, in my head, was so not me," Hsu admits. "I had to figure out a way to make her funny." Suffice it to say, she figures it out. Her well-meaning lie to hunky fiancé and fellow soap star Clarence (Desmond Chiam), a devout Christian, about her abstinence and saving sex for marriage becomes fodder for Lolo and the audience. (Park, for her part, is amused that Hsu initially couldn't envision herself in the role of the star, quipping that the admission is "hilarious now with you as an Oscar nominee.")

When she first read for the role of the irreverent Lolo, though, Hsu immediately thought of Cola, one of the first friends she made when the Southern California native moved to Los Angeles from New York to pursue a career in Hollywood after having taken Broadway by storm. "I was like, I know this woman Sherry Cola and she is Lolo," Hsu says. "I could hear her voice, I could hear her sense of humor just exploding from the script."

While Hsu experienced that initial disconnect, the same could not be said for Wu, a stand-up comic and writer who plays Deadeye to kooky perfection. As a self-proclaimed weirdo, the role felt like "destiny," Wu says. "My friends were like, 'You actually need to book this role. This is the only role you'll ever get that makes any sense for you. You have to do it.' And then me and my partner were like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is destiny.'"

As the comedian puts it, "Have you ever seen someone who has never been awkward in their life try to play awkward? I have lived the life of someone who has been so awkward and genuinely had a hard time in middle school and I ended up doing comedy, so I knew that there was something I could bring to this character that not that many [others could]." Many journalists, Wu notes, have asked how they perfected Deadeye's memorable deadpan face, "And I have to be like, 'Well it's actually just my face in a resting position.'"

"In those ways," Wu says, "I was like, 'This is it. This is my moment.'"

Joy Ride is in theaters July 7. Watch the stars discuss auditions, that drug bust sequence on the train, the K-Pop cover of Cardi B's "WAP," and more in EW's Around the Table above.

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