Kelly Marie Tran has come out as queer in a new interview.
The 35-year-old Star Wars and Raya and the Last Dragon star opened up about her identity in conversation with Vanity Fair while discussing her forthcoming rom-com The Wedding Banquet.
“I haven’t said this publicly yet, but I’m a queer person,” Tran said.
“The thing that really excited me about it was I got to play a person that I felt like I knew,” the actress added of her new film, a remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 queer comedy of the same name. “I don’t feel like I’m acting at all in this movie. I’m here doing this amazing movie with these amazing people. I’ve never been in a queer space before. I’ve never truly felt this accepted before.”
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The Wedding Banquet — directed by Andrew Ahn — stars Tran as a woman named Angela who tries to have a baby through IVF with her girlfriend Lee, played by Lily Gladstone.
Her character then plots a fake traditional Korean wedding ceremony with a male friend to raise funds for IVF as he secures a green card, per Vanity Fair. The film also features performances from Bowen Yang and Han Gi-chan, with Joan Chen appearing as the mother of Tran’s character.
“I came out to my mom in a very specific experience,” Tran told the outlet. “The scenes that I have with Joan Chen in this movie are very similar to the experience that I had.”
Ahn, 38, told Vanity Fair that, for the remake, he wanted to tell “a story that felt reflective of the community as I’ve experienced it growing up.”
“The spirit is the same, and I think it’s even more queer,” he said of the project.
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Tran has previously addressed online harassment she faced after her work in the Star Wars franchise — including 2017’s The Last Jedi and 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker — after she became the first woman of color to lead a Star Wars film. Tran also notably starred as the first Southeast Asian Disney princess in 2021’s Raya and the Last Dragon.
In 2021, she said in a Hollywood Reporter interview that “if someone doesn’t understand me or my experience, it shouldn’t be my place to have to internalize their misogyny or racism or all of the above.”
“Maybe they just don’t have the imagination to understand that there are different types of people living in the world,” she added at the time.
Tran’s role in The Wedding Banquet follows her performance in 2023’s The Young Wife, as well as her work in Netflix’s Sweet Tooth. Per Vanity Fair, The Wedding Banquet is set to premiere in theaters in the spring.
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