Eddie Huang Tapped New York’s Downtown Cool Kids to Read His Movie
“You guys always wear Stone when you kill people,” says Chloe Cherry. Except it’s not Chloe Cherry, really. It’s Chloe Cherry playing Veronica, the green-juice-obsessed borderline nymphomaniac with a sadistic streak who dates the main character, Malcolm, in Eddie Huang’s movie Tuna Melt.
Malcolm is a hitman. And he does, indeed, wear head-to-toe Stone Island when he goes out to kidnap, maim, or murder.
This is all, basically, classic Huang. Tuna Melt, set in Los Angeles, is the story of a steezy guy who’s in a destructive relationship with a shallow, beautiful woman. He’s also dealing with deep-seated childhood trauma. And there are strong notes of streetwear culture woven in. Last Thursday, as the Canadian wildfires turned New York City into a hostile alien planet, Huang partnered with Substack to stage a table read of the movie at Baohaus, his East Village restaurant. Black-cloth-bound copies of the script were handed out to audience members — courtesy of Stone Island.
It was a perfect little Eddie Huang microuniverse, including the cast, most of whom Huang tapped himself. Along with Cherry, Evan Mock played Malcom, Chet Hanks took on the role of Malcolm’s co-conspirator and best friend, and Joey Bada$$ was their boss. (Mock and Hanks were both dressed in Stone Island jackets.) Bada$$ has been a regular at Baohaus for a while; he always orders eight fish bao. The front-of-house and kitchen staff got to know him, and eventually Huang approached him for the role. “It’s very deranged,” Bada$$ says of the script. “I feel like that’s Eddie’s style.”
Before the audience filtered in, the group — which also included the actresses Kiersey Clemons and Highdee Kuan and Kid Super founder Colm Dillane — did a first run-through in private. For Bada$$, who prefers to go into jobs cold, it was his first time reading the script. “The shock factor was there,” he says. People were cracking up.
The second, more public reading had a biblical feel, with each of more than a dozen cast members lined up at a long table facing the small audience. They were set off by a black velvet curtain, with Cherry sitting in the Jesus chair. As they read through the 90-minute film, Huang, who played a bit part, sat off to one side, mouthing along to the words. At one point, like a perfect stage dad, he asked the cast to please project so the crowd could hear better. Cherry and Mock sat up in their chairs like kids caught slumping at school.
The whole thing felt sort of out-of-body, like a group of theater kids getting together to sound out a project. Except you blinked, and there was Chet Hanks ripping his vape between lines. “I feel like we moved to New York as kids and thought, ‘Every day we’re going to hang out with artists’” and kick work around, Huang says. “We used to. But around 2016, 2017, I feel like brands and businesses started to dictate how the art was made. This table read is a big ‘fuck you’ to that.”
“It creates buzz,” Bada$$ adds. “Now people are excited by it. They’re invested in it already. It kind of forces networks and buyers to pay attention.”
Technically, Tuna Melt is a finished product that Huang has been sitting on since 2022. But he hasn’t been able to get it financed. Huang says he asked two of the leads’ agents to send the script to them years ago. “Now that we’re friends, they’re like, ‘No one ever sent me the script,’” he says. “Because the script is wild. And I don’t think people wanted their actors in it.”
Some of the “wild” parts include: Malcolm and his younger brother being sexually abused by a Hulk Hogan-esque ex-pro wrestler named Uncle Jerry under the pretense of feeding raw chicken to Uncle Jerry’s pet alligators. Or Veronica waking up during a liposuction procedure while having an allergic reaction to her anesthesia. Or Malcolm and his hitman partner being hired to maim a guy named Keith, who owns a streetwear brand called Keith, for doing one collab too many. (Malcom’s partner embeds a pair of throwing knives in Keith’s shoulders. And then Malcolm asks the store’s only other employee for her number.)
The Keith of it all, Huang admits, is a little on the nose. For one thing, he tapped Dillane to read the part of the streetwear magnate. For another, the brand is called Keith — an obvious play on Ronnie Feig’s Kith. “I really like Ronnie as a person, but I just don’t like economies of scale,” Huang says. “And they are the most scaled version of streetwear. And it’s like, enough is enough. How many times do we need to see ‘Kith’ on top of somebody else’s logo? Imperialism in streetwear is kind of whack. This is counterculture. It should be countercultural. So that’s where it comes from.”
In the end, as with most things Huang does, the absurdity of Tuna Melt is matched by its depth of feeling. Malcolm works through his self-loathing. Veronica goes off to torment someone new. Keith learns his lesson. And as the crowd of downtown creatives filed out, the cast lingered on Baohaus’ back patio shooting the shit and exhaling cigarette smoke into the apocalyptic yellow-grey sky.
