Joy Ride cast pitch sequel ideas, from a bachelorette party to Bowen Yang recast

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Joy Ride.

With the help of her pals, Ashley Park embarks on a grand adventure across Asia to track down her birth mother in Joy Ride, Adele Lim's R-rated yet poignant romp about friendship and identity.

The Emily in Paris star portrays Audrey, a successful attorney and Asian American adoptee whose firm sends her on a business trip to China to close an important deal with a client. She enlists her childhood best friend, the wise-cracking and irreverent Lolo (Sherry Cola), to be her interpreter. Joined by Lolo's eccentric cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and Audrey's former college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu), now a famous soap star in China, the four set off on a journey from Beijing to a rural village to find Audrey's birth mother via train — but a fellow American passenger and drug dealer derails everything, making way for a wild excursion across the motherland before the friends ultimately find themselves in Korea, where Audrey confronts both the past and future — and herself.

As for whether a sequel could be in order, "I would absolutely be down to keep telling this story with the three of you," Cola tells her costars in EW's Around the Table with the cast, above.

Wu has a pitch, referencing the 2012 Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum buddy comedy 21 Jump Street: "We should sneak into a high school and call it 21 Joy Ride."

Cola interjects: "21 Hump Street."

Jokes aside, there's room for more storytelling. With Kat salvaging her relationship with her religious fiancé and fellow soap star Clarence (Desmond Chiam), whom she initially lied to about remaining abstinent amid his insistence to hold off on sex until marriage, Park loves the idea of a sequel centered on Kat's bachelorette party. "Hawaii [or] Turks and Caicos," Park suggests. "Tulum?"

"But something happens and we end up in Antarctica!" Hsu quips, nodding to Wu's previous insistence on a cold Antarctica setting.

But Cola is not a fan of the cold. "Joy Ride in space!" she counters.

Perhaps a Joy Ride and Saturday Night Live crossover? "I also pitched getting recast by Bowen Yang," Wu says. "Just have him step in for Deadeye, we don't say a word."

Sexual escapades and genital tattoos aside, the comedy — which puts Asian leads in the driver's seat of a genre almost exclusively commandeered by their white counterparts — offers an affecting message about knowing and loving who you are. The representation is not lost on the leads, who had an appetite to bring the story to the big screen.

"There's historically been such a mentality of, 'There's only one seat at the table,'" Hsu says. "I remember reading the script and being like, 'There can be four of us.'"

"I think all of us, when we got the script, we were like, 'This movie has to happen,'" Park adds. "As much as we've all wanted things in the past, it was more about, 'If I get to be a part of this, that's so cool, but please, please, please let this movie happen.'"

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

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