Star Wars Actress in The Last Jedi Comes out Gay("Never Felt This Accepted before")
 |
| Star Wars: The Last Jedi actress Kelly Marie Tran has come out as queer. |
I don't know Abby but Adamfoxie wanted to make sure her latest News story was posted here.
Abby Monteil is a New York-based writer. Her work has also appeared in The Daily Beast, Insider, Elite Daily, Thrillist, and others.
("Them" first posted this story)
Tran shared the news during a recent interview with Vanity Fair as part of a first look at Fire Island director Andrew Ahn’s remake of the 1993 classic queer rom-com The Wedding Banquet, in which she stars alongside Lily Gladstone, Bowen Yang, and Han Gi-chan.
“I haven’t said this publicly yet, but I’m a queer person,” she said. “The thing that really excited me about it was I got to play a person that I felt like I knew. I don’t feel like I’m acting in this movie… I’ve never been in a queer space before. I’ve never truly felt this accepted before.”
The original Wedding Banquet film, which was directed by Brokeback Mountain filmmaker Ang Lee, starred Winston Chao as a queer Taiwanese man living in New York City who acquiesces to his parents’ dreams of him having a traditional Chinese marriage by marrying a struggling artist looking for her green card before their extravagant wedding ideas upend his plans.
In Ahn’s new take on the story, Tran plays Angela, a woman who is trying to have a baby through IVF with her girlfriend Lee (Gladstone). Meanwhile, her best friend Chris (Yang) and his partner Min’s (Han) relationship is tested when Min’s family pressures him to return to Korea to take over the family business. Instead, the friends hatch a scheme in which Min will fake-marry Angela, raising funds for her IVF treatments and satisfying Min’s family back home.
Saving Face star Joan Chen plays Angela’s mother, a PFLAG chapter-running ally who struggles to wrap her mind around the fact that her daughter is “marrying” a man.
“I came out to my mom in a very specific experience,” Tran told Vanity Fair. “The scenes that I have with Joan Chen in this movie are very similar to the experience that I had.”
A film about modern bonds of queer found family is worlds (dare I say galaxies) away from the Disney juggernaut through which Tran has made her career through projects like the 2021 animated movie Raya and the Last Dragon and the Star Wars sequel trilogy. When Tran joined the latter with her role as Rose Tico in 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, she faced a barrage of racist and misogynistic vitriol from a toxic, vocal subset of the Star Wars fandom, who have a history of going after anyone who doesn’t fit their rigid, exclusionary idea of what the franchise should be.
“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,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “Maybe they just don’t have the imagination to understand that there are different types of people living in the world.”
Ha, Ha
Kristin Chenoweth, Ariana Grande
Ariana Grande and Kristin Chenoweth Agree Glinda Seems a Little Gay
In an acknowledgment of Wicked’s homoerotic undertones, Grande said the Good Witch “might be a little in the closet.”
Meanwhile, Tran is no stranger to championing LGBTQ+ representation in her films. Back in 2021, she told Vanity Fair that she believes her titular Raya and the Last Dragon character is queer and decided there were “some romantic feelings going on there” between Raya and Gemma Chan’s character Namaari.
“I think if you’re a person watching this movie and you see representation in a way that feels really real and authentic to you, then it is real and authentic,” Tran said.
Comments