Happy Hour
In which we spend 60 minutes with your faves, doing what makes them happiest.
“Okay, I was worried about this,” says Kelly Marie Tran. We’re standing in line at a McDonald’s in midtown and just discovered that its ice-cream machine isn’t working. It’s not an uncommon struggle, but rather than forgo our plan to discuss her new film, The Wedding Banquet, over vanilla soft serve — one of Tran’s favorite pastimes, she assures me — we quickly adapt. Within seconds, her phone is out and she’s on McBroken.com, a website that monitors the status of every nearby McDonald’s ice-cream machine, and we reroute. We head downtown on foot, first to the location at 51st and Broadway — but again, no luck. Bravely cutting through Times Square, we dodge Elmos and talk about musicals (Death Becomes Her and Maybe Happy Ending are some of her recent favorites), until we spot another set of golden arches on 45th Street.
Thankfully, the third time’s the charm, and we secure two vanilla ice-cream cones. “I’ve loved them since childhood,” Tran says of her go-to comfort food as we find a corner table upstairs. “Now, with work stuff, I’ve been so privileged to take jobs that take me to different places in the world, and there’s always a McDonald’s and I’m always gonna get a vanilla ice-cream cone.” That constant (well, if the machines are working) has made Tran something of a connoisseur. “I can tell when it’s too icy. I can tell when the cone is not crunchy enough. There’s little things,” she says.
Work brought her to Vancouver last spring to film The Wedding Banquet, which hits theaters on April 18. Andrew Ahn’s romantic comedy, a remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same name, also stars Lily Gladstone, Bowen Yang, and Han Gi-chan — a cast that quickly gelled despite shooting in just four short weeks. “I think Andrew does a really good job of cultivating an environment where people feel comfortable being vulnerable with each other, and since every person on that set was so excited to tell that story, it was easy for us to build these bonds,” Tran says. Before long, they were watching Couples Therapy together and going on weekend excursions: “We all took a group trip to see an elderly Korean choir sing Mamma Mia hits.”
In The Wedding Banquet, the foursome play two queer couples and friends who strike a deal with one another: a green-card marriage in exchange for covering expensive IVF treatments. It’s all further complicated when one of their grandmothers (played by Youn Yuh-jung) flies in from Korea to determine if the marriage is valid. But one of the film’s most nuanced portrayals of queerness (in addition to Yang’s uptight character unwinding with vintage Real Housewives episodes featuring Camille Grammer) comes via Tran’s character, Angela, and her complex relationship with her PFLAG-obsessed mother, played by Joan Chen. “I was really nervous to do all of the mother-daughter stuff, mainly because I have a really complicated relationship with my own mother, and her relationship with queerness and my own coming-out experience. I was scared to confront that within myself and within my reality,” Tran says. “Outwardly, Angela’s mom is every queer kid’s dream of a parent — but then you realize that she never acknowledged this really terrible thing she did, where she stopped speaking to her kid for a couple of years because of it. So Asian … but also relatable on a greater scale of, not just the Asian community, but being a queer person and how complicated your relationship with your parent can be if they’re unable to accept that part of you.”
“We’re at a good crunch level today,” Tran adds, lightening the conversation with her soft-serve expertise upon reaching the cone. I deliberately wait until we’re done eating to ask about one scene in particular, where Angela vomits on Min (Han Gi-chan) during their wedding ceremony. “It was like warm oatmeal, and poor Gi-chan had the bad part of this whole thing. I was having a great time. I’d put the oatmeal in my mouth, then he’d have to lift me and walk around, so by the time I was vomiting on him, the oatmeal had adjusted to my body temperature and he could barely feel it … so gross,” she says, laughing. “But it’s always fun when you get to do something like that.” It’s also a good reminder that despite the admittedly heavy conversations about representation and identity, The Wedding Banquet is a comedy at heart. One that also features a fast-paced “de-queering” of the house to keep up appearances for their sham wedding. If Tran were faced with that same task in her own home? “I have a magnet that is a vagina with teeth in it that I got at a queer art festival,” she says. “So that’s the No. 1 thing, probably.”
Another fun moment in the film comes when Tran is dressed in traditional ceremonial garb and she’s told she resembles Padmé Amidala — Natalie Portman’s character from the Star Wars prequels — a reference that goes over Angela’s head. “That was already in the script before I was even cast,” Tran says, despite it seeming like a nod to her own big break playing Rose Tico in The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. Being included in the Star Wars franchise was an experience she now says was “wild to go through,” specifically when she became the target of a wave of racist attacks online — a pattern that’s unfortunately still all too common for actresses of color. At the time, she wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about refusing to be relegated to the margins, which read in part, “I want to live in a world where people of all races, religions, socioeconomic classes, sexual orientations, gender identities and abilities are seen as what they have always been: human beings. This is the world I want to live in. And this is the world that I will continue to work toward.” Seven years later, starring in movies like The Wedding Banquet feels like the work she was writing about. “I did four films last year, and all of them were Asian filmmakers, three of them were queer,” she says. “It’s really exciting to be at a point in my career where I’m now celebrating the things that I was taught to be ashamed of not that long ago. When I think about that, that makes me really happy.”
