Kelly Marie Tran comes out as queer from the set of The Wedding Banquet
Kelly Marie Tran is set to star in an upcoming remake of The Wedding Banquet, based on Ang Lee's 1993 groundbreaking queer rom-com. In the original, a Taiwanese immigrant hatches a scheme to marry a Chinese woman to help her get a green card while covering for the fact that he's in a relationship with a man. Andrew Ahn's new version will take different twists, but it still hits close to home for the cast, including Tran. "I haven’t said this publicly yet, but I’m a queer person," she says in a new profile from the set for Vanity Fair.
"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 at all in this movie," she adds. "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."
The remake stars Tran and Lily Gladstone as a gay couple trying to have a baby via IVF. Their best friends, played by Bowen Yang and Han Gi-chan, face their own difficulty as Han's family pressures him to return to Korea and take over the family business. They launch a scheme to have a traditional Korean wedding that will help fund the fertility treatments and secure Han a green card to stay in the U.S.
Tran points to the mother-daughter relationship in the film as one of the ways it feels true to life: "I came out to my mom in a very specific experience," she explains. "The scenes that I have with Joan Chen in this movie are very similar to the experience that I had." And in comparison to Lee's Wedding Banquet, she says, "The spirit is the same, and I think it’s even more queer." You can read more about the upcoming remake here.