Hollywood Is Mad for MahJong

Leave it to Larry David, who championed pickleball on Curb Your Enthusiasm, to journey the mahjong wave. During a March YES Network industrial, David calls Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay in a tailspin when he can’t discover the sport on TV, lastly snapping, “I won’t watch it. I’ll play mahjong! I don’t care.” Kay asks dubiously, “You play mahjong?” — a gap for David’s line-gone-viral: “What, are you too cool for mahjong?”

Turns out David and his spouse, Ashley Underwood, are quietly studying the sport IRL in Montecito, the place Meghan Markle clacks tiles along with her personal “mahj squad,” which consists of designer Tracy James Robbins (spouse of Brian Robbins), cosmetics entrepreneur Victoria Jackson and former WME agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Godmothers bookstore in Summerland, co-owned by Jackson and Walsh, affords mahj video games and classes.

A pastime relationship again to 1800s China, “old style” mahjong had a resurgence within the Twenties after Standard Oil exec Joseph Park Babcock returned from a decade within the nation and teamed with Abercrombie & Fitch to promote imported units. Then he taught Douglas Fairbanks play. Soon President Warren G. Harding and first girl Florence Harding had been clicking tiles within the White House. In 1926, siblings Fred and Adele Astaire had been photographed at a mahjong desk in London, as they headlined the musical characteristic Lady, Be Good!

Now mahjong is having one other splashy Hollywood second. While the sport by no means went away, its latest explosion in recognition appears linked to a post-pandemic craving for social connection, mixed with influential stars posting their mahj ardour and the collectible great thing about the tile units themselves. Some query whether or not all of the American mahjong hoopla is irreverently stretching the sport a bit too removed from its Asian heritage.

(If you’re too cool to know the principles, it’s loosely like gin rummy however with tiles as a substitute of playing cards. In conventional Asian mahjong, gamers create versatile tile mixtures, whereas American mahjong follows preset palms. There are greater than 40 variations performed globally. Standardized in 1937, American mahjong provides eight joker “wild cards.”)

“I think, post-COVID, there has been such a big explosion because it’s literally a convening,” says veteran producer Suzanne Todd (Bad Moms), who has organized energy video games since 2003 and performs at dwelling, the Bel-Air Bay Club and Jonathan Club. “It feels like once you start, that it’s required. It’s that sharing of actual air space together. Also, it’s this thing now of all the hot girls having grandma hobbies.”

Then there’s the tile fixation. “People collect tiles like they collect Birkin bags,” exclaims Todd, whose foursome contains Monica Lewinsky, head of MGM Television Lindsay Sloane and pattern forecasting guide Jane Buckingham. “When we started playing, there were basically two companies you could buy tiles from. Now, having a certain level and amount of tiles has quickly become very status-y. Crisloid sets that sell for $2,000 to $3,000 go on the secondary market for $15,000 to $20,000.”

Mahj to Go co-founders Lynne Spillman and Heidi Brooks, who oversee open play and tournaments at San Vicente Bungalows, have been noticed slapping their branded tiles round city with Reese Witherspoon and Cindy Crawford. Blake Lively famously had her Oh My Mahjong set delivered to a Manhattan courthouse in February so she may observe amid authorized battles with Justin Baldoni. A Hollywood mahj trainer shares what may be probably the most coveted seat on the town: “All the moms in Malibu have been vying for years to be in Julia Roberts’ mahjong group!”

The skyrocketing enterprise in tile units, mats and merch by primarily white-owned American firms that substitute conventional Asian symbols with each motif conceivable (flowers, meals, vacation iconography) has led to whitewashing allegations. As did the Hallmark Channel movie All’s Fair in Love & Mahjong, which landed May 9 to on-line blowback for its lack of Asian illustration within the forged.

But backlash has not blunted the expansion and evolution of the sport, which continues to take pleasure in cross-cultural recognition. Bicoastal Chinese American mahjong teacher Cari Kuprenas first realized American mahjong 20 years in the past on the Starbucks in Brentwood Village. Now she counts Sarah Jessica Parker (whom she calls “a mahj OG and razor sharp”) and Jessica Seinfeld amongst her college students. “The Chinese invented paper and the compass and gunpowder and everyone’s using those,” says Kuprenas, placing the claims of cultural appropriation into perspective. “This game has its origins in China but, in 1937, Jewish women made their version of it and that’s what we’re all playing. And I’m Chinese.”

The great thing about mahjong, Kuprenas says, “is that it’s 70 percent luck and 30 percent skill. So if I taught you tomorrow, you could beat me, even though I’ve been playing for decades.”

In June, Kuprenas and public relations maven Carol Bell will debut a Mahj within the Wild podcast. Among the primary company are Just Jared founder-fashion stylist Jared Eng and Eileen Foliente, former membership director at San Vicente Bungalows, who debuted their buzzy Mahjong Megachurch membership in November. With invite-only companies in Eng’s Beverly Hills dwelling, the group has made its mission to show the standard “old style” Taiwanese model of the sport to a wider viewers. When Eng bumped into Hacks stars Hannah Einbinder and Paul Downs at a latest occasion, they set free a rallying cry of “Mahjong, mahjong, mahjong!”

Maria Shriver and Hoda Kotb first realized from Oh My Mahjong instructors at a November retreat in Los Cabos for Shriver’s non-profit, Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement. “I’m trying to get better!” Shriver tells THR. “We know from studies that it’s good for brain health, which is … why I tell every woman I meet that if they don’t know mahjong and care about their brain, they should learn how to play!”

Most swear their mahj teams are all about enjoyable, however Eng sees the low-key jostling: “It’s a little Hollywood, like ‘Who’s in the room?’ But you’re focused on the game and trying to win. In mahjong, you’re reading people and building alliances. You are paying attention to dynamics. It’s social strategy disguised as a game.”

This story appeared within the May 20 situation of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click here to subscribe.