Kelly Marie Tran Was a Queer Icon Long Before 'The Wedding Banquet'

Finally, the world is catching up to how excellent Kelly Marie Tran is. Tran was already leaving an impact in the mid-2010s with her standout guest appearances on various CollegeHumor sketches, but she really excelled with her big feature film acting debut as Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Playing this ordinary soul caught in a corrupt galaxy, Tran exceptionally continued the legacy of Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher in exuding recognizably human personalities within grand sci-fi confines.

One of the standout elements in the Sequel Trilogy’s best movie, Hollywood tragically ignored Tran for further live-action work in the immediate years after The Last Jedi. Even Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker infuriatingly cast her aside in favor of resurrected Palpatine nonsense. Thankfully, in the mid-2020s, the floodgates have finally opened for further Kelly Marie Tran live-action acting roles. Tran has a deluge of further non-animated parts on the horizon, including playing Angela in The Wedding Banquet. Portraying Lee’s (Lily Gladstone) partner and the fake wife to gay man Min (Han Gi-chan), Tran’s work here sounds like it could be teeing her up to become a queer icon.

But let’s get real: Kelly Marie Tran’s been an LGBTQIA+ hero for eons now.

The intersection of Tran’s work and the queer community (a population she’s a part of!) is so recurring it even seeps into her Disney-approved mainstream movies. Rose Tico’s fury at exorbitantly wealthy places like Canto Bight built on slave labor (“I want to put my fist through this beautiful city”), for example, echoes similar furious emotions at injustice felt by queer souls everywhere. Just as Canto Bight’s neon lights and golden coins engross Finn, cis-het folks too can think the status quo amounts to satisfying razzle-dazzle. Tico, though, has been forced to experience this economically imbalanced galaxy’s hardships firsthand.

Like queer folks, Tico hasn’t been spared from the dark underbelly underpinning all this external spectacle. If Luke Skywalker in the late 70s reflected young males in flyover America yearning to be part of “faraway” wars and sociopolitical conflicts, Tico’s circumstances echo queer folks conscious of corruption that their cis-het neighbors cannot comprehend.

On a much lighter note, Tran’s voice-over work as Raya and the Last Dragon’s titular princess almost immediately intertwined with online folks speculating about the film’s hero/villain dynamic. Tran’s Raya and her adversary Namaari (Gemma Chan) have such a potent rapport even when they’re swinging swords at each other. The butch/femme lesbian vibes were so off the charts that the gaydars around the globe started blaring. In interviews about the film, Tran openly supported queer interpretations of Raya while also noting that she was passionately “shipping” Raya and Namaari together. God knows the Mouse House is about as supportive of LGBTQIA+ characters and artists as the Trump administration hates human rights violations. However, in Tran’s hands, two different Disney characters still resonated as deeply relevant to LGBTQIA+ moviegoers, albeit in very different fashions.

Moving on to more under-the-radar live-action work from Tran, she portrayed the openly queer character Jules Shaw in all but two episodes of the short-lived Elizabeth Olsen TV show Sorry for Your Loss. It’s incredibly understandable if this show doesn’t sound familiar. After all, it aired on Facebook’s short-lived foray into original programming. Ah, the days of Yahoo Screen and Facebook Watch. Still, Tran garnered positive marks for her work in this well-reviewed show, particularly for rendering Shaw as a multi-faceted person within the program’s weighty, raw atmosphere. After establishing herself with CollegeHumor yuks and Star Wars spectacle, Tran now solidified her chops with subdued material. That same accomplishment also further extended how queer and queer-adjacent material manifested in her filmography.

Seven years after Sorry for Your Loss, Tran’s resurgence in live-action cinema has come through her appearing in a genre near and dear to the hearts of LGBTQIA+ film geeks everywhere: horror. This cinematic domain blossoms from seeds that folks like James Whale, Clive Barker, and The Babadook planted. You can’t separate queerness from horror cinema, no matter how hard you try. No wonder, then, that Tran anchoring films like Control Freak or upcoming titles Kodak SuperXX and Rock Springs has just further cemented her queer icon status. Pairing all this with playing an openly queer women in The Wedding Banquet makes Tran’s current cinematic obsessions pure catnip for LGBTQIA+ moviegoers.

Then there’s Tran’s real-world endurance, a quality uber-relevant to queer folks. In the wake of just existing within a Star Wars movie, Tran received a bombardment of only vitriol. After becoming the first prominent woman of color in a live-action Star Wars feature, Tran’s social media profiles (not to mention any articles or Wiki materials about Rose Tico) were inundated with racist and sexist comments. All of this horrific harassment boiled down to one statement: “You don’t belong here.”

Tran’s experiences at the hands of online trolls were deeply rooted in her being a Vietnamese American. Any struggles of white queers are not an exact parallel with her woes. However, queer folks everywhere (particularly those who are also people of color) often grapple with “you don’t belong here” rhetoric. Your body language is “too fruity”. Your clothes aren’t right. Why is your hair like that? As authors like Jenn M. Jackson have said way better than I ever could, cis-heteronormativity and white supremacist standards in American society rigidly define who’s “proper” in this country and its pop culture.

Yet, despite going through this despicable crucible, Kelly Marie Tran is still standing. She appeared at Star Wars Celebration 2019. She reprised the role of Rose Tico in a voice-over capacity for various 2020s LEGO Star Wars specials. In the mid-2020s, she’s experiencing an exciting resurgence through movies like The Wedding Banquet. Suffering hardship doesn’t innately make Tran an icon to queer people. It’s how she’s come out the other side, taking each day as it comes. The joy and acceptance she experienced on the Wedding Banquet set could’ve sounded like a fantasy to Tran in the worst days of Last Jedi-fueled harassment.

Now, that’s just another aspect of her reality. Kelly Marie Tran is a queer icon whose life experiences tenderly tell other LGBTQIA+ folks (particularly those who also intersect with further marginalized identities) that you can survive the worst. Bigots want to erase folks like Tran, yet they’re still here. Not only that, but her body of work reflects a multitude of queer experiences, right down to inspiring SO MUCH Raya and Namaari fanart. The Wedding Banquet’s Angela is just the tip of the iceberg in Kelly Marie Tran’s queer culture contributions over the last decade.