Having ponied up $3.5 million for a modern villa tucked into the rugged and ritzy mountains above L.A.’s tony Bel Air neighborhood, Nora Lum, more famously and mononymously known to YouTube, TV and movie viewers as Awkwafina, has unsurprisingly put her loft-like contemporary starter condo in the heart of West Hollywood’s perennially trendy Melrose Avenue shopping and dining district up for grabs at $2.395 million, not too much more than the not quite $2.3 million she paid for the townhouse-style residence only about 1.5 years ago.
Now in her mid 30s and initially a popular YouTuber who began her ascent to more traditional Hollywood stardom almost a decade ago when her hilariously saucy rap song “My Vag” went viral, the idiosyncratically monikered Queens-raised internet personality and rapper turned actress has had a particularly hectic and successful couple of years building an impressive resume of plum film and television roles. She had supporting parts in “Ocean’s 8” and the megahit “Crazy Rich Asians” before she landed a role opposite Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the 2019 blockbuster “Jumanji: The Next Level” and a starring role in “The Farewell,” the latter of which earned her a Golden Globe Award that made her the first woman of Asian descent to win in the leading actress in a film category. As if all that isn’t enough to secure a spot as a budding Hollywood heavyweight, she is also the co-creator, writer and executive producer of the Comedy Central series “Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens,” in which she stars as a fictionalized version of herself.
Listings held by Danny Brown at Compass show the multi-story condo is squirreled away behind a locked gate in a two-unit complex with a lushly planted courtyard entry and measures in at about 2,350 square feet with two bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms, plus a self-contained guest unit with outside entrance.