Kelly Marie Tran Is Living Her Best Life

In Andrew Ahn’s remake of the seminal queer Asian-American film The Wedding Banquet, which came out earlier this year and is now available to stream, Kelly Marie Tran plays Angela, who lives in an overflowing home with her chosen family, including her girlfriend Lee (Lily Gladstone), her best friend Chris (Bowen Yang), and his longtime boyfriend Min (Han Gi-chan). Angela’s mother May (Joan Chen) supports her as an eager, enthusiastic PFLAG member with an energy that veers startlingly close to Amy Poehler’s I’m-a-cool-mom vibe in Mean Girls, which Angela tries hard not to roll her eyes at.

Later, it’s revealed that after Angela came out, May didn’t speak to her daughter for years before changing her mind—but has never addressed it nor the hurt inflicted on her daughter by her actions. Tran mentions that she went through something similar when coming out to her own family, picking up on the way loved ones can enact hurtful dynamics, only to sweep these actions under the rug, leaving the consequences acknowledged and unprocessed. “That, to me, feels very accurate in terms of my parents—like, there’s something that happens and then you kind of just have to…skirt around the entire situation.”

“That’s not a unique experience to a lot of Asian queer people,” she continues. “[But] I think that, speaking from my own experience, I come from a pretty conservative Vietnamese family, and queerness is not immediately embraced, and that can be really difficult. [Luckily], a lot of the scenes felt like I was healing from those experiences by being able to play them out with Joan Chen.”

Being who she is, and giving herself permission to be who she is, has been a long journey for Tran. The 36-year-old was born in San Diego to parents who left Vietnam after the war. In the U.S., her father found work at Burger King, while her mother worked in a funeral home. Money was tight—going out to eat was a treat, sodas were considered an expensive waste of money, and to afford a trip to the buffet, her parents would white-lie about their kids’ ages. They were anxious for Tran and her two sisters to succeed, and expressed that anxiety in ways that felt stifling to her. “I lived in a household where you weren’t allowed to have an opinion,” says Tran. “You were supposed to always respect your elders without question.”

To mentally escape, Tran turned to fantasy. As a child, one of her favorite books was The Things with Wings by Greg Holch, in which a magical fruit tree allows children to become butterflies and the protagonists teach others to overcome their fear of soaring. “I loved anything that took me out of the world immediately,“ she says. “I remember spending days at recess singing and pretending I was somewhere else.“

Musicals, not movies, were her first love—she fell in love with the stage when she saw a production of Oklahoma! in middle school. Tran, who sings and dances as well as acts, applied to college for musical theater. Her parents said no—they wanted her to pursue a career they believed would offer a more stable, guaranteed future. “I ended up being like, ’I’m going to community college, and I’m going to pursue acting,’ which pissed them off immensely,” she says.

After two years of community college, she transferred to UCLA, where she worked multiple jobs to pay her tuition. At the time, Tran knew no one in the entertainment industry. One job she worked, though, was at a headshot studio, where parents would bring their children in for auditions. It was the first time she gained a glimpse into the process of how people pursue acting. “There was something about being in that environment where suddenly it wasn’t this far away, fantastical thing,” she says. “It was suddenly real people who I interacted with.”

It was a turning point—suddenly, she felt like acting was attainable. She gave herself permission to submit to commercial agencies. She spent hours on the entertainment industry platform Backstage, scrawling the message boards—“Shoutout to truthteller59 who would constantly give really good info about which agencies to submit to.” Her efforts led to a breakout role in two Star Wars prequels, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, as the deeply competent engineer Rose Tico—and the first woman of color in a leading role in a Star Wars film. “The coolest thing about that experience was seeing my parents [...] really re-evaluating the things that they believed about themselves and what they could do, and what their kids could do,” she says.

Unfortunately, despite praise for her performances in Star Wars, the highly visible role also attracted plenty of racist and sexist trolls. She wiped her Instagram, leaving behind only the bio “Afraid, but doing it anyway. 🦁.” She went to therapy, laid low, and, three years later, returned to voice the titular character in Disney’s animated film Raya and the Last Dragon. This year alone, she has starred as an FBI agent in Forge, a convincingly confident motivational speaker in Control Freak, and now, one of the leads in The Wedding Banquet—a film she’s described as one where she’s “never felt more accepted.”

Indeed, there’s an internal ease to Tran’s character—and the rest of her chosen family—in The Wedding Banquet, and a confidence in who they are; the tension comes primarily from the narrative they’re forced to spin for their families and Korean tabloids.

I asked Tran if she could describe who she was, as a child, in a few words. “The first word that came into my head was mập, which is this word in Vietnamese where people call you chubby,” she says. “But then I remember thinking to myself, ’That’s not what I thought of myself. That’s just what everyone around me was calling me, like my family and my cousins and my mom.’”

Now, Tran is finally living the life she’s worked so hard for—with the space to be herself. “I think I’m in a really privileged place at the moment, and I don’t take it for granted,“ she says. “I’m very much grateful to be where I am, and at the same time, I think I’ve worked a lot in therapy to recognize that, okay, I’ve worked hard and I deserve to be here.

“When I think about being a child [...] there were all these little things that now are not a part of my current existence because of the privilege that I have attained from finding success in this industry,” she adds. “There were so many rules about what I could and could not do, what I could and could not have, that no longer exist for me.”

The Wedding Banquet is now streaming.