‘I’m a queer person:’ Star Wars actor Kelly Marie Tran comes out as queer

Kelly Marie Tran, star of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, came out as queer in a new interview with Vanity Fair.

Tran, who is about to star in The Wedding Banquet, a remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same name, revealed her sexuality for the first time while speaking about the movie to Vanity Fair. “I haven’t said this publicly yet, but I’m a queer person,” she told the interviewer. “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 … 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 movie, helmed by gay director Andrew Ahn, follows Tran’s character Angela as she tries to have a baby with her girlfriend Lee (Lily Gladstone). In order to pay for IVF, she decides to marry Min (Han Gi-Chan)—who’s in a relationship with her best friend Chris (Bowen Yang)—so that she can get money and he can get a green card. Meanwhile her mom (Joan Chen) is baffled by the whole situation. It goes without saying that things soon get difficult.

The relationship between mother and daughter is set to be one of the most important threads of the movie. “I came out to my mom in a very specific experience,” Tran told the magazine. “The scenes that I have with Joan Chen in this movie are very similar to the experience that I had.”

It’s great to see Tran’s career going from strength to strength, because she was attacked by racist trolls after appearing in The Last Jedi. Because she was the first Asian woman with a major role in a Star Wars movie, she became a target, and the stress caused Tran to delete her Instagram account. Later, she met the trolls head-on with an essay titled “I Won’t Be Marginalized by Online Harassment” for the New York Times. Her concluding words were, “You might know me as Kelly. I am the first woman of color to have a leading role in a Star Wars movie. I am the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair. My real name is Loan. And I am just getting started.” We can’t wait to see what she does next.