Interview: Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran Talk Found Families, Holding Space For Real-Life Pain Alongside Onscreen Representation and More in ‘The Wedding Banquet’

Remakes are forever a tricky proposition. Especially if you’re taking a beloved classic for a spin. Ang Lee’s 1993 film, The Wedding Banquet, might not reach the heights of Brokeback Mountain or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in terms of public awareness but as a key part of the queer canon, the film is beloved by almost everyone who’s seen it. Releasing in a small boom period for queer, independent cinema (the film would predate classics like Go Fish and The Watermelon Woman), The Wedding Banquet originally followed a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant man, who, to keep his parents from discovering his relationship with an American man, decides to marry a Chinese immigrant woman. As part of their deal, she’ll receive a green card, and he’ll keep his parents off his back, at least that’s the plan. As is true of every rom-com, everything goes haywire as his parents surprise him with a visit, demanding to throw him an extravagant wedding. Way ahead of its time in terms of depicting queer dynamics and their communities, The Wedding Banquet might not seem like a film in need of an update but in the hands of Andrew Ahn (along with the original’s co-writer James Schamus), a new take on an old story comes to life in profound and lovely ways.

Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone as one couple, and Bowen Yang and Han Gi-chan as another, the four friends share a home in Seattle. Min (Han), the only member of the group not out to his family, is told by his wealthy grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) that he must take over his grandfather’s company or he’ll be forced to return home to South Korea. Afraid of his homophobic grandfather’s reaction to finding out his truth, Min concocts a plan wherein he’ll quickly marry Angela (Tran) at the courthouse. As a return on the favor, he’ll pay for her and her partner Lee (Gladstone)’s next round of IVF. He and Chris (Yang) can live in harmony, Angela and Lee can have their child, all’s well that ends well, right? Well, as with the first, everything is thrown on its head as Ja-Young makes a surprise visit to America to suss out the situation for herself.

Tackling the brutal reality most millennials face trying to make it in today’s America, Ahn injects vital vibrancy into the story. Rent being shared between many friends, how, if at all, to conceive a child, commitment vs living for yourself, these are all things so many of us of a certain age struggle with as we’ve reached adulthood. How do you lay down roots when the odds are so heavily stacked against you? How do you do so as part of the queer community? The AAPI community? Both? 

Ahn approaches all of this with his now-trademark patience and restraint. If you’re familiar with his work, be it Spa Night or Driveways, or even the more heightened Fire Island, you know Andrew Ahn has an astonishing ability to convey so much through allowing his characters to say so little. Decades of the painfully unsaid are unspooled with maybe a word or a simple glance. His cast uniformly sings in his hands, his younger stars melding beautifully with legends like Youn and Joan Chen, who plays May, Angela’s mother. That dynamic is one rife with contradiction: May, surprisingly fully supportive of Angela, but in ways that veer straight into toxic narcissism. Elsewhere, a particularly devastating moment of understanding between Gladstone and Tran, told through silence, is an immediate contender for scene of the year.

To break down acting worlds of emotion nonverbally, what it means to hold the joy of representation on screen with the pain of being persecuted in real life and the role of found family in queer communities, Gladstone and Tran sat down with Brandon Streussnig. Their conversation begins already in progress, just after the three discover they all have a connection to Pittsburgh.

Brandon Streussnig: Speaking to how small our world is, queer communities have always been full of chosen families or found families and I think that’s become even more the case with millennials. The internet’s made us all closer, rent is too damn high, we tend to congregate towards each other now more than ever. How important was that for you to be able to show that on screen? 

Lily Gladstone: I thought it was a brilliant way of reimagining what worked so well with Ang Lee’s original. In the end, there was a bit of a chosen family thing going on that may have just felt a little bit risque or taboo in the early 90s, but it was just kind of reality. I feel like the whole house and the whole family structure of this was really just an act of decolonized love. Just a return to something really human. And I do love that there was a conversation that was carried over, not just about how queerness itself and the way that society has changed, but how we’ve made more space since the early ’90s. There’s also this carryover of a socioeconomic conversation into the new version. To hold onto a house like that in Seattle now, you would need four incomes. Even if you inherited it from a family. I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was a seamless way of having a lot of conversations without making it some, you know, well, without picketing. [laughs]

Kelly Marie Tran: I agree. I also think something that I loved about the reimagining of it and something that Andrew [Ahn] and James [Schamus] did so well was sort of widening the representation of different types of queerness. At least in terms of that first film to this one, there has been such a time gap, but also we have Kendall [Bobo Le], who’s non-binary, and it’s just cool to have a wealth of representation in that world. 

BS: You spoke about picketing on film, and it’s refreshing because I think we live in a time where a lot of films, unfortunately, feel like somebody’s Twitter drafts on screen. It can be a little frustrating even when you agree because something’s lost cinematically. I loved this because it is very much a queer film – it explores queer identity but it’s also just about typical struggles that relationships go through. Having kids, money tensions, miscommunications all over the place, can you tell me about building that out? 

LG: Joan’s [Chen] talked about it a lot, just about being a parent, knowing that part of the package of being a parent is hurting your kid. She’s saying, like, ‘I’ve done that, we all do it.’ And, I think that’s one thing that’s really encouraging about where we’re at in the film right now. This is an independent film that has become a Hollywood film. Even before Sundance, before there was a gauge on audience response, it was very clear that this was going to be a film that was going to be universal. I think that’s also one of the great things about just widening the lens and celebrating filmmakers that are here because of trailblazers like Ang Lee. Audiences are smart, and they like being invited inside of the house. You don’t always need to have this outsider representation of general whiteness, general straightness, whatever it is, to guide you into the world and then be the one who’s learning along lockstep with the audience. It’s a formula, I think, that people have relied on for too long. When we just open the door and you come in and you’re just a fly on the wall and experience it, you catch up. You gain more empathy, you apply your own experience to it. And I think in some ways, I mean, it’s just getting into performance theory. It’s like there’s the Brechtian idea of, you don’t ever try to trick your audience into thinking they’re watching something real, they’re there to watch a story. So you just advertise “these are the story things you’re engaging in.” [laughs]

I think for some audiences who like that, they like having a little bit of a distance from their lived experience to what they’re watching, but you still find value in what you’re seeing, and it’s even easier to build empathy the further away it is from yourself. One of the things we’re so excited about is that we knew this film was going to be a warm, safe space for people. We didn’t realize that it was going to be so valuable and necessary now. It’s like, people coming in from actual picket lines have a minute to feel a safe environment and have a happy ending.

KMT: Yeah, and actually I’d love to hear your opinion on this [motions to Gladstone], sorry I’m just turning this into a conversation between the two of us now. [Laughs] But, I think we both had this feeling, being part of something where you’re celebrating part of your identity, when that identity is also being persecuted in other ways, and holding that complicated experience. You’re not picking projects, and you can’t plan ahead for that stuff. You don’t get to control when a film comes out and what environment it comes out in, but I think as artists and as people who are aware of what’s happening in the world today, I know that we just feel the heaviness of that, of those two things happening at the same time. Like, how great is it that we get to be part of this movie and we’re celebrating this community, but also how terrible is it that at the exact same time this community is being persecuted and their rights are being taken away, and how do we hold both those things at the same time? 

LG: I’m really excited that this is a living example of, and this is one of the hardest things to do and actualize and internalize, but it’s something that a good number of my community that are activists and organizers do – I got this recently from Dallas Goldtooth, who’s a Native actor, writer in Reservation Dogs, and he’s been on front lines. He’s an organizer at Standing Rock – but they all talk about resistance as joy. When you are a person whose community is vehemently under attack right now, practicing not being downtrodden, not being fatigued. That’s all by design. They’re trying to make us exhausted and feel worthless. So, celebrating who we are and having joy through it, and doing it in ways where maybe we can find a way of being humorous about it, that bolsters each other up, keeps us going but still celebrates who we are. We’re taking that narrative, and we’re going to push it in your face louder. 

BS: That aspect of joy is something that I loved about this film because, again, there are tensions. It’s very much about the struggle, but I don’t think I’ve seen a film where its character is already happily out, like yours, Kelly, but the tension isn’t that your mother isn’t supportive, it’s that she’s too supportive. I think many people can relate to having a parent who makes their child’s success an extension of themselves. What was building out that relationship like?

KMT: Well… 

BS: Hopefully that’s not too personal. [laughs]

KMT: No, it is! [laughs] But I think it’s also part of our job, using our own stuff. I mean, I’ve said this before, but I think it’s a privilege to be an actor. I think it’s the greatest privilege when you get to use your real-life experience and figure something out about yourself while you’re making something. And I think Andrew and James did such a good job of capturing a mother/daughter relationship, specifically in the Asian community. Like this idea that the mother and daughter don’t really communicate. Angela’s been resentful of the things that May has been doing for so long and…

[At this point, a man with a leaf blower passes by, disrupting the conversation.]

LG: Oh, man, I feel Cate Blanchett’s blood boiling right now. [laughs]

KMT: Anyway, yes! [laughs] There’s so much resentment there festering for so many years, and then Angela finally tells her mom about it. And yet, there’s no resolution that happens. They just sort of continue with their relationship, and May shows up for her in a different way, but that to me is so Asian. The idea that we had this fight and now we’re just gonna like, walk around it and we’re not gonna resolve it, but we’re just gonna continue with our relationship. That’s so Asian to me and so authentic to that experience. I absolutely used some of my own experience with my mother in that relationship, and Joan is such an incredible artist and actress. Joan and I never had a conversation, like you and I had [motions again to Gladstone]. We just felt really lived-in, in that relationship. 

BS: Andrew is so great at showing and not telling. There aren’t any big speeches, and

you both are so good at expressing with just your eyes. Especially that moment at the end. How do you perform so much emotion so quietly?

LG: We had shot that scene as scripted with dialogue, one or two takes, and then Andrew started paring it back, paring it back. And then we got to the end of it, and you could see that he was getting to where he wanted with it. And then he was just like, ‘Can we try something? I really want to see this scene without any lines.’ So we did that a few times, and there were a couple of different things off camera that Andrew’s feeding us: ‘Try this kind of reaction, now this kind of reaction.’ What’s interesting is it’s not like we were suddenly just performing the same scene as scripted, but miming it or whatever. It became a different thing, a lived-in thing. There were some takes where she’s asking a question very explicitly, and I’m affirming the answer very explicitly, then we find ways to do it so we don’t let the audience off the hook too easily. 

It’s hard to describe unless you’re in it and you’re doing that. Human beings just, you know.. what is it – some really high percentile, 70, 80, 90% of our communication is nonverbal. And you just feel that when you’re in a scene. 

KMT: Yeah, also, it sort of takes the pressure off everyone when it’s just sort of in the moment. Like, there was no plan for any of it, which was nice because then we were really just listening and reacting to each other, and that’s sort of the best place to be anyway. 

LG: It’s like, what can you really say at that moment? It’s an unusual circumstance these two were in.

BS: The original film is such a massive part of the queer canon at this point, especially in terms of the 90s indie boom. Are there any queer classics you both go back to as favorites? 

LG: There’s one that’s surprising, and you can tell because it was made in the early 1970s, that it’s not explicitly a queer film, a little kitschy and a little Hollywood about it. And demonstrative instead of realistic, but very grounded in reality. There’s a character in Little Big Man. I forget her name, but you meet her as a girl when Dustin Hoffman’s character starts living in Cheyenne. They acknowledge him as a child, like he’s called by a boy’s name, but he was dressed as a girl. He had a doll, he was kind of doing, you know, the maudlin sort of feminine thing that would have read feminine to a 1970s filmgoing audience. But just depicting that this boy was a girl and was living as a girl and didn’t go out and play the games with the boys, stayed with the women, and did women’s tasks and activities. And then you meet that character as an adult, and there’s just this acceptance. Maybe through the lens of the filmmaker and for the audience, there’s a little bit of a humor thing applied, but as far as the way that was directed, this character, this two-spirit character, is open and accepted and just has a sort of an existence in Northern Cheyenne, and that’s kind of my lived experience. 

There’s certainly homophobia and extreme transphobia in Indian country, but that film did a good job. I guess we’re talking anthropologically, but it honored something that you also still see. I have a lot of very close Northern Cheyenne friends. One of their stepfathers is a down-to-his-bones cowboy, and lives in a very homophobic culture, but is also a traditionalist and was raised speaking in Northern Cheyenne as a first language, which has no gendered pronouns, neither does my language. So I just love that. It may be one of the first revisionist Westerns, long before Dances With Wolves. You see that sort of depiction of gender fluidity, and that’s a traditional thing. 

KMT:  I honestly think it’s because I’m a big musical theater fan, so all of my references are going to be musicals. The movie that I grew up with, and also the musical that I was obsessed with that had a lot of representation, was Rent. 

BS: That’s my partner’s favorite movie. 

KMT: Yeah? Wow.

BS: I know it so well. [laughs]

KMT: Yeah! And again, so ahead of its time and such a wide representation of the queer community and just that one musical. Yeah, big fan, big fan.

BS: So this is, forgive me, very ignorant and white of me, but I’d never heard of the Duwamish until this film, but that’s what you’re playing here, Lily.

LG: Most people haven’t. 

BS: It sounds like you pushed for that. Can you tell me about what it meant to you to represent them on the screen? 

Yeah, I mean, there’s already this undercurrent of a gentrification story, and I think it’s a really beautiful thing that the woman who grounds these three chaotic friends – One, somebody with a green card and immigrants with immigrant status, and then two, a second or third generation, children of immigrants, grandchildren of immigrants –  [is Indigenous]. And especially because, I mean, we didn’t know that this would become topical again, but with this administration diving into the Native American Citizenship Act to try and find legislation to justify deporting people. It’s using Indian history as an excuse to deport our relatives and our chosen family. But even before that became so freshly topical, it felt like it was going to be a really important statement that in Seattle, where I live, where I spent half of my life, there’s this beautiful action that’s happening in all of the coolest neighborhoods –  the most artsy, queerest, inclusive neighborhoods, in the coolest shops that I like to frequent. There’s a sign in the windows: ‘Real Rent Duwamish’, which means we pay property taxes to the city. We also participate in donations with a tip jar here or at this event there, where the entry fee goes to Real Rent Duwamish. 

The Duwamish are not a federally recognized tribe on paper. They don’t exist, but Chief Seattle is the Chief of Damish, and the city of Seattle is named after him. His daughter, Princess Angeline, is a very beloved, well-known figure in the Pacific Northwest. She was given that nickname by a white woman settler who just thought she was so sweet and gave her the name Princess Angeline. There’s not a princess structure, really,  that was just sort of planted onto her. But I decided that that was part of my name swap. [Gladstone changed her character’s name from Liz in the script to Lee on screen.] I wanted to honor Princess Angeline and honor a Duwamish presence, so we changed Liz to Lee, which gives you Angela and Lee, Angeline. 

It felt like it was a way of deepening the stakes for Lee if she’s providing this home that she so desperately wants to hold on to, and wants a child from her own DNA, badly enough that they would go through two rounds of IVF and deplete their life savings. It’s like, why is it Lee’s egg and not Angela’s? So it was to answer those questions for myself and to kind of deepen the groundedness that Lee holds in this household and maybe deepen the socioeconomic, the political, the historical conversation about it. Proclaiming this character as Duwamish, living on Duwamish land – our neighborhood, Ballard, which is where one of the most prominent Duwamish Longhouses was burned down. Ballard, a neighborhood where my dad grew up in Seattle. Ballard’s where all the Native folks and the Scandinavian immigrants lived. It’s kind of who built that community. So yeah, making that choice was a good opportunity to raise awareness of the Duwamish people. It’s also just a statement about how chosen family is a very traditional thing, indigenously. And fighting against the idea that immigrants are colonizers. Colonization is a very specific tactic used by some people who have immigrated to the United States, but immigration itself is a story a lot of people share. It’s a lot of people’s origin, and not all immigrants are colonizers.

The Wedding Banquet will be released only in theaters from Bleecker Street on April 18.