On Thursday afternoon, July 16, I walked into Baohaus to find Chloe Cherry, Evan Mock, Joey Bada$, Chet Hanks, Kiersey Clemons and more all lined up in front of a black curtain. The Taiwanese restaurant in New York’s East Village was overflowing; everyone was searching for a chair, bao in hand, for a rather mysterious table read with Substack. When Tuna Melt, written by filmmaker and Fresh Off the Boat producer Eddie Huang, was announced in 2022, it was described as “an updated Pulp Fiction meets High Fidelity”. The upcoming film is a dark comedic feature that’s about a hitman – that’s all anyone knew going in.

Huang says Tuna Melt is for “an unwell, chronically online post-streetwear person”. It’s an extremely specific audience that he says has been hard to describe to Hollywood, with studios and financiers reading the script, loving it, but then making “very odd” suggestions on who to cast. Huang decided to gather everyone in his world – some of whom he knew he wanted to cast when writing the project, and others he discovered in the years since – to provide a peek into his vision for Tuna Melt. It’s one that weaves in love and death with mentions of food (and Lana Del Rey songs giving hitmen acid reflux), all while staying entirely on the cultural pulse, even in its choice of casting. In making the film, Huang plans on sticking to his original direction and, through the laughter emanating across the room, it’s one that firmly landed, in Baohaus at least. “These are all the people I believe in,” he says. 

Here’s everything we learned at the Substack Tuna Melt table read (without too many spoilers). 

1. IT’S A LOVE STORY DISGUISED AS A FILM ABOUT A HITMAN

Over the course of an hour and a bit, it became clear that Tuna Melt is an unconventional romance film, following the lead, Malcolm, a mid-30s Chinese hit man, in his search for love. Huang himself described it as such, with a glass of chilled red in hand. “I wrote this piece while thinking about the person I’d like to meet and the love I would want in my life,” he says. “I was writing from a place of emptiness – of desperation, hope and manifestation.” In the script, Malcolm similarly talks a lot about wanting to meet “his person”. 

2. ITS CHARACTERS ARE PAINFULLY ONLINE

If you were a fan of Chloe Cherry in Euphoria, you’ll love her as Malcolm’s “ready to die” girlfriend Veronica. She loves Erewhon, says she’s “literally serving cunt 24/7”, gets a butt lift, fights with Malcolm over whether tamarind juice is drinkable without sugar, and grapples with the fact that she can read all the books that people recommended during the pandemic, but she’s still white. 

3. FOOD IS NEVER JUST FOOD

It’s unsurprising that a film called Tuna Melt has food references throughout – Huang is a chef and restaurateur after all – but they were particularly enjoyable. Through food, Huang covers a range of topics, like white people’s judgment of Chinese culture, or how the epitome of love is being “well fed”. My favourite food moment, however, was when Mary, Malcolm’s newer love interest, screamed “Fuck it! Eat it all!” launching into a monologue about how counting calories is the root cause of her rocky relationship with food. 

4. MASCULINITY IS EXPLORED THROUGH MURDER

There’s a moment in Tuna Melt when Malcolm goes: “Killing is how adult males play with each other”. By comparing his profession to that of Michael Jordan or LeBron James, he tries to rationalise the violence he partakes in. Dre, a fellow hitman, even frames killing people as solving the world’s “people problem”. Needless to say, in a time when young men are struggling to find a purpose, Huang uses murder to explore the fragility of masculinity. 

5. IT’S ULTIMATELY ABOUT TRAUMA

The story starts with a disturbing story about an alligator man, and the tuna sandwich Malcolm ate before he showed up. This experience follows Malcolm until the end, when Mary calls him out on the fact that he “became a tuna melt”. Underneath all the fish references and humorous one-liners (like “Bitch I got grippy socks on for good luck”) is a message about processing and moving on from trauma.