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SPOILER WARNING: This interview contains plot details from “The Wedding Banquet,” in theaters on Friday.
Kelly Marie Tran is having something like a breakthrough in her career — and she’s not taking it for granted.
Over the past few years, things have made a 180 from the period of her life when Tran was facing racist and sexist vitriol from toxic “Star Wars” fans after she joined the blockbuster sci-fi franchise as Rose Tico in 2017’s “The Last Jedi.”
“I’ve been able to learn how to celebrate the parts of myself that, at the time, I was scared of, or I was made to feel like I had to be ashamed of,” Tran tells Variety. “This past year, I did four movies, and they were all Asian stories with Asian writer-directors, and a few of those were also queer writer-directors. I remember looking back and thinking, ‘Wow! How crazy is it the thing that I was persecuted for, I now get to make art about?’”
Among those films is “The Wedding Banquet,” which revisits Ang Lee’s groundbreaking 1993 feature. Andrew Ahn (“Fire Island,” “Spa Night”) directs the new version, which he co-penned with James Schamus, one of the original film’s writers.
Tran leads the heartfelt rom-com as Angela, a scientist who is one-fourth of a cohabitating queer friend group living in Seattle. Angela and her partner, Lee (Lily Gladstone), want to start a family, but Lee’s costly IVF treatments aren’t working. Another couple, Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-Chan), live in their garage. When Min’s wealthy grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) pressures him to leave his artist life behind for an important role in the family’s corporation in Korea, Min scrambles to find a way to stay in the U.S., given that his student visa is about to become invalid. His plan? Stage a marriage to Angela to secure a green card, and he’ll pay for Lee’s IVF treatment in return.
Kelly Marie Tran, Lily Gladstone, Han Gi-Chan and Bowen Yang in “The Wedding Banquet.”
BFI Flare
“The Wedding Banquet” marked a few “firsts” for Tran. For one, the story closely mirrored the Vietnamese American actor’s personal history to an extent that few other projects had. Tran, empowered by her time making the film, came out publicly as a queer person.
She hadn’t been planning to do so, but when a Vanity Fair reporter visited “The Wedding Banquet” set, Tran discussed her identity. The publication gave Tran the chance to mull over whether she wanted that detail included in its coverage, and she ultimately decided to allow it.
“I don’t want to hide this part of myself that I’m celebrating in this beautiful piece of art,” Tran says now, noting that that the “entire experience [of filming] was about celebrating queerness and celebrating chosen family and celebrating queer joy, which I didn’t know I needed so badly at that point in my life.”
In fact, the set was made up mostly of queer people, which was a completely new environment for Tran as well as much of the crew. “So many people would come up to us as cast, and be like, ‘I can’t believe that we get to be working on a movie where everyone is queer, and a lot of the people behind the scenes are also queer,’ so we all got to celebrate that together. And it felt really natural to share that part of me publicly,” Tran says.
When she read the script, Tran was struck by how similar she was to Angela. There were coincidences, like the fact that they both drive a Prius and the movie was originally set in Los Angeles, where Tran resides. But there were also deeper parallels between Angela’s journey as a queer person and Tran’s own experience navigating her identity.
“Angela has a complicated relationship with her mother and had this really complicated coming-out experience, which I also had,” Tran says.
At the beginning of the film, Angela’s mother, May (Joan Chen), receives local honors for her advocacy on behalf of the queer community. May presents as a hard-working ally, having cemented a narrative about herself as a mother who immediately supported her daughter after she came out as a lesbian. Their real story is messier: May was estranged from Angela for years. Then, when she reappeared in her daughter’s life, May took up the mantle of an activist, seemingly using Angela’s identity as clout.
Tran found the expression of that mother-daughter relationship to be accurate to the way that communication sometimes ebbs and flows in her own family.
“It’s such an authentic representation of what it is to be an Asian child and to have gotten into a fight, and then to not have addressed it fully with your parent afterwards,” Tran says. “I’ve had that experience so many times — not just with coming out, but with so many other things.”
Indeed, the film touches on the myriad family dynamics that queer Asian people can encounter. For example, Min avoids coming out to his grandmother and grandfather for fear of being disowned. On the other hand, Chris’s parents accept his identity.
“I grew up in a really traditional, Catholic, conservative way,” Tran says. “My parents are refugees from the Vietnam War. They come from a culture that is very patriarchal, and it was really complicated for me to share that part of myself authentically with them.”
Han Gi-Chan, Youn Yuh-jung and Kelly Marie Tran in “The Wedding Banquet.”
Luka Cyprian
“The Wedding Banquet” delves into the struggle for authenticity, with its central conceit — a lavender marriage — leading the characters to reflect on what they really want out of their romantic relationships. And, as the title suggests, the film features a wedding, with Angela and Min taking part in a traditional Korean ceremony. Both are decked out in Korean hanboks and go through the elaborate customs — albeit with less enthusiasm than a genuine couple probably would.
Shooting the scene was a particularly special day on set. “It was very much a communal experience,” Tran says. Ahn was emotional because he’d “always wanted to have a Korean wedding like this,” she recalls. “We were all dressed up, and Andrew started crying. I was just so excited to be there, and it was such a beautiful start to the day.”
The production was dedicated to depicting the ceremony accurately. Ahn shared footage from his brother’s Korean wedding ceremony as an example of what the characters would experience, as did cinematographer Ki Jin Kim, who showed his own wedding videos. Beyond that, the hanboks were flown in from South Korea, plus there was an officiant on hand to ensure the ceremony was being executed correctly, as well as a wedding expert who guided Tran through the traditions.
“I just remember being so grateful that I was in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing,” Tran says. “But lucky for me, Angela was able to channel that, ‘I have no idea what’s going on.’ That was exactly how she was supposed to feel.”
The ceremony goes partly awry when Angela vomits on Min while he’s circling the wedding table, carrying her on his back. “Poor Gi-Chan had to be vomited on multiple times, but I think we only did two or three takes of that,” Tran says, revealing she spewed warm oatmeal for the scene. “It was really, really fast and really silly and fun. And a lot of those lines with me and Gi-Chan going around are improvised.”
Filming often involved improvisation, with Ahn encouraging his actors to experiment with the scenes. There’s an especially poignant moment toward the end of the film when Angela and Lee reunite after a rift in a wordless embrace. That scene evolved out of a conversation between Tran and Ahn.
The original script had Angela texting Lee something that made Lee want to return, so Tran asked Ahn what that text might have said to initiate their reunion. After considering the question, Ahn came up with an idea for their reunion to occur as it does in the final cut — a subtle moment in which the couple’s history and love for each other is evident in how they silently negotiate their way back to each other.
“When you have someone like Lily Gladstone, who is such an incredible actress, who communicates so much without words … it was awesome to be able to do that with Lily and Andrew,” she says. “It felt really natural and beautiful and emotional.”
Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone at “The Wedding Banquet” premiere in Los Angeles on April 14.
Gregg DeGuire
Speaking of Gladstone’s talent, the film also nods to both actors’ filmographies in clever meta references. In one scene, the four friends have to rid the house of anything queer culture-related, which happens to be nearly everything: including books, movies and their wall decor. One film that’s stowed away is Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” which stars Gladstone. Tran experienced a similar full-circle moment when a character brings up “Stars Wars.”
“I thought it was hilarious,” Tran says. “That was already in there before I was cast, so when I read it, I kind of laughed. I was like, ‘That’s funny.’ And now I think it’s this beautiful little reference.”
A lot has changed for Tran since “Star Wars.” But as she looks back on her experience with that fandom, she knows that the racism she faced was symptomatic of a larger, continuing issue. When considering what she wants to see change for actors of color who might not receive the support they need when they appear in major franchises, she replies: “The world?!”
“It’s interesting how it seems to be happening pretty consistently to actors of color who find themselves in these spaces,” Tran explains. “And I think these occurrences are a microcosm for the social climate that we’re living in. And it’s really unfortunate.”
Tran points out that people of color are often at “the forefront of storytelling” now and that audiences could perhaps begin to evolve, too. “The hope is that people who are not afforded the ability, maybe, to have access to these communities of queer people or people of color, are able to see through the art that people of color and queer people are also human, and they have hopes and dreams,” she says.
“We live in a world where those identities have been weaponized so that people are not able to see the bigger picture,” Tran continues. “I really just want people to recognize, it’s the system that’s the problem. Stop scapegoating people of color or queer people or anyone who’s different.”
With the special experience of filming “The Wedding Banquet” under her belt, Tran plans to continue tackling different characters and mediums, but she’s aware of her privilege in being able to move between genres.
“It’s just really exciting to be making art about things I care about and continuing to stretch myself,” Tran says, mentioning she has a horror movie due out next year. “I’d love to do a musical, I’d love to do a comedy. I’d love to do a single-camera sitcom.”
As she looks ahead, Tran is conscientious about spotlighting marginalized perspectives. “I hope that [through] the exposure and the creation of making more things about these populations, people are able to recognize humanity and maybe ask questions about the things that they’ve been socialized to believe.”
