Henry Golding is a British-Malaysian actor who started out as a host for BBC World News’ travel documentary called ‘The Travel Show’. Relatively unknown, he shot to fame in the 2018 American comedy ‘Crazy Rich Asians’. After participating in a global casting call back in 2017, he quickly impressed the director John M. Chu with his charm and personality, which won him his first lead role in the aforementioned film.
The actor has gone on to make four more movies since then. While ‘Last Christmas’ and ‘A Simple Favour’ have been slight critical duds, they have done well commercially and have shown that Golding is not afraid to play different role types. His turn in 2019’s ‘Monsoon’ has been critically acclaimed, with his portrayal of a Vietnamese-British man returning to his birth country (Vietnam) after 30 years, to perform the funeral rites for his parents, especially praised.
But perhaps what was even more surprising was his villainous turn in Guy Ritchie’s ‘The Gentlemen’. His portrayal of the gangster “Dry Eye” was met with disbelief and awe; this role truly showed his range as an actor. It’s almost a safe guarantee to say that this role has pretty much made him a bankable actor and his latest casting as Snake Eyes in the upcoming 2021 film of the same name pretty much proves it.
He is now being considered for the lead of the remake for the world-wide phenomenon ‘One Punch Man’, which is produced by Sony’s Columbia Pictures. The Japanese anime’s live action remake was announced back in April and it had the anime fans buzzing. Golding is being considered to play the role of Saitama, a superhero so powerful, he can defeat any opponent with a single punch. Due to his immense power, he has gotten bored by the lack of challenge and awaits a worthy opponent. This role is kind of different to what Golding usually does, but he has proven that he has the acting chops to pull it off. Let us see if Sony will go through with this casting.