Back in May 2022 when promoting Fire Island, filmmaker Andrew Ahn shared with The Queer Review the impact that seeing Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning classic The Wedding Banquet had had on him when he watched it at home with his parents when he was only eight years old. “It was really special. It showed me, as a nascent gay boy, what my life could be like. It’s been a real inspiration.” Cut to April 2025, and this week sees the theatrical release of Ahn’s own reimagined version of Lee’s cherished 90s rom-com, co-written with the original film’s screenwriter James Schamus.
Expanding the central characters from a gay couple to a queer quartet, Ahn’s film stars Bowen Yang as the commitment-phobic Chris, who turns down a marriage proposal from his Korean boyfriend Min (played by Han Gi-Chan, making his English-language screen debut). That results in a second proposal, made to Chris’ best friend Angela, played by Kelly Marie Tran, in return for funding the expensive IVF treatment that she is undergoing with her girlfriend Lee, played by Lily Gladstone. In return, Min will be able to stay in the country and avoid taking on a corporate job in the family empire. The exceptional ensemble cast also includes Joan Chen as Angela’s mother May Chen, Youn Yuh-Jung as Min’s grandmother Ja-Young, and Bobo Le as Chris’ cousin Kendall. Read our ★★★★ review of the film.
Following its world premiere at the 41st Sundance Film Festival and its international premiere at the 39th BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival, The Wedding Banquet opens theatrically in the United States on Friday, April 18th from Bleecker Street. Ahead of the film’s release, Andrew Ahn and Kelly Marie Tran speak exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about their actor-director collaboration and what it means to them to be offering a film to audiences that celebrates the queer community at this challenging time.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: Andrew, given that the original film held such a special place in your heart, I imagine that you must have had some reservations about a remake, so what convinced you to revisit it and reimagine The Wedding Banquet for 2025?
Andrew Ahn: “I think like any great piece of art, it inspires art. I remember watching The Wedding Banquet again in preparation for my meetings with the producers and it inspired so many thoughts because it resonated with me. It made me think about my boyfriend. It made me think about our conversations around getting married and our conversations around having kids. So it felt very organic and I was so excited to explore this, maybe because these were—and still are—topics that I’m exploring in my own life.”
“As much as there was pressure and hesitation, there was also the inspiration of a great film motivating me. So it wasn’t hard to say, ‘yes’. Of course, there was a long process of developing the film, but what felt good about that process was the further we developed it, the more excited I got. There are some projects where the more you develop them you start to lose interest. The Wedding Banquet became this incredible snowball and then to finally get it into production and work with these amazing actors, I was like, even if I wanted to stop it, I couldn’t!”
Kelly, what was your approach to playing Angela and in what ways could you connect with her as a character?
Kelly Marie Tran: “I connected with her in many ways. I think most actors use their own personal lives to fill in the details of a person and to find the commonalities between you and the character that you are creating. I felt so inspired by this community around Angela and what I loved about playing her is that I got to have all of these scenes with every single one of these incredible actors and their characters in the film. Angela has such a specific relationship with her mother and we see how complicated that is. I definitely used my own personal experience in that. Then she has very specific, and yet very different, relationships with Min and with Chris and with Lee.”
“Andrew and James did such a beautiful job of writing these specific relationships and creating so many layers. Honestly, in an ensemble with so many other incredible actors, all I really had to do was just sit there and listen and respond to everything that I was given. So it was easy because of all of the amazing people that Andrew put together. What a gift!”
What was it like to create those rich on-screen relationships with Lily Gladstone as Angela’s girlfriend Lee and with Bowen Yang as Angla’s best friend Chris? We really feel the history between them.
Kelly: ‘With both of them, we didn’t have much time before we started filming to create relationships and history. But Andrew had all of us do this thought exercise where we were asked to create a secret that we kept from him and then another secret that we each kept from each other. It was a really quick way to build rapport and build history. On top of that, Bowen and Lily—and also Joan Chen, Han Gi-Chan, Youn Yuh-Jung and every single person Andrew assembled—were so open and vulnerable and generous with their artistry and also as human beings. So it was easy to fall into these really lived-in relationships. I think that says a lot about Andrew’s ability to cast and his ability to create an environment where you feel free to try things, which is hard when you’re around essentially a bunch of strangers. It was a very welcoming environment.”
Andrew, what excited you about assembling this cast and how did you go about adding some personalized touches to match the characters to the actors who were playing them?
Andrew: “It really was this kind of Asian American Avengers cast, this rom-com Avengers because everybody is such an individual but we knew that we had to create this cohesive family. I think it was just a case of trusting my gut and really getting a sense of these actors’ processes. I remember talking to Youn Yuh-Jung about playing her character, which was originally written as Min’s mom, not Min’s grandmother. She was very humble and she said that she felt like she was a little old to play this character’s mom, but what if we made her the grandma? Then we started talking about how that might change their dynamic and their relationship.”
“I could see the actor’s inspiration in her eyes and as a director when you see that you stoke it because that’s really exciting. That was something that I wanted to really encourage with every actor. With Bowen, there is a scene that Chris has with his cousin Kendall where they’re playing video games. That was initially written as them working at a food co-op, but I was like, ‘No, Bowen’s a gamer!’ It’s such a non-moment, but it always gets a laugh out of me when Chris is playing video games and he goes, ‘headshot!’ It’s so great.”
“With Kelly, she is such an incredibly rigorous actor and we were talking about the reconciliation scene that she has with Lee and she asked this incredible question that I did not have an answer to and it really inspired the scene. That’s one of my favourite scenes in the film, but had it not been for this collaborative actor-director relationship we may have never gotten there. There are so many examples of this throughout the entire film that I really embraced. I wanted this film, more than any other film I’ve made, to be so intensely collaborative and it was so much fun because in a lot of ways it takes the pressure off me. It’s not all about me, it’s not all about my authorship, and I think it’s going to be a process that I practice throughout the rest of my career.”
It sounds like a really special set to be on. Kelly, I wondered to what extent being part of The Wedding Banquet encouraged you to be public about your own queer identity?
Kelly: “I definitely was not planning to come out at all. What happened was, we were filming the Korean wedding scene, and this Vanity Fair reporter, David Canfield, came to set and was asking us about our experience. His first question to me was, ‘What are you most excited about?’ I said, ‘I’m excited to tell a queer story as a queer person’. Then I was like, oh, I haven’t thought about what it means to come up publicly at all.”
“He was so kind. David, and also Joe Pirro one of our producers, both came to me separately, and said, ‘Hey, if you don’t want this to be out in the world, it doesn’t have to be out in the world and you have some time to think about it’. I want to give them all of the praise because I know that’s not a normal experience and it just goes to show the environment that we were working in, which was one that was so supportive and understanding of that experience. By the end of shooting, I knew that I had just had such a beautiful time embracing this part of my identity and sharing that with so many other people; cast and crew, who also shared that identity. I thought to myself, why would I hide this? So it felt like a happy accident and I’m so thrilled to be able to publicly say that I’m part of the queer community.”
It’s a great family to be part of. On the other side of that, in the film there’s a really funny scene before Min’s grandmother arrives where there’s a hurried “de-queering” of Lee and Angela’s home. Andrew, how much fun did you have choosing what to include, like the books, artwork and the DVDs that we can spot?
Andrew: “We had so much fun. It was very collaborative. Our production designer and our prop master are both queer women, and they were like, ‘It’s our time to shine!’ All the art and the cultural elements, like the books and the DVDs, were really fun to think about. It’s such a great sequence in the original film and we wanted to pay homage to that. It was also this recognition that queer homes are so gay!”
“That line that Kelly says—’Everything in this house is gay!’—was not scripted, that was something we found on set and it’s such a great button to the sequence. It was our opportunity to be as Easter-eggy as we wanted. There is this question of, ‘Well, if Lily Gladstone’s in this movie, who’s in Certain Women?!’ Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is one of my favourite films of all time so I had to put that in there. So Yong Kim is such an inspiration for me and her film Lovesong, so I wanted to include it. It was a lot of fun and there are a lot of random connections.”
Finally, what does it mean to each of you to be putting out a film that celebrates queer joy, that’s so heartwarming and so poignant, at this particular time?
Andrew: “I’m excited that this film can can offer people a moment to take a breath and feel safe amongst friends and family. That’s what art and film is so good at doing. It allows us to put down our walls, because the screen’s not going to come out and attack you, and it’s through that experience of vulnerability that I think we can heal, that we can become inspired, so that when we go back out into the world, which is often a very scary place, we have more armour, we have more strength, to be who we want to be.”
Kelly, how about for you?
Kelly: “That was beautiful. Yeah, I agree with everything Andrew said. I think it’s unfortunately a complicated time for the queer community and it makes the experience of doing press together and promoting this film and what it’s about so poignant. To be both celebrating the beauty of this community and having to recognize that this community is also being persecuted. As a member of the queer community, but also a member of other underrepresented communities, I’ve had this experience before where you are in a position where you are getting to celebrate the beauty of something that is being threatened. I don’t even know how to put into words what that feeling is. I can only say that it makes me recognize just how much gratitude I have for the existence of this film. Andrew put so much of his heart and soul in it and was brave enough to do the self work to recognize this part of his identity and be proud of it and also share so much of it with the world. Without that we wouldn’t be here. So I hope that people watch this film and also are inspired to share parts of themselves, so that we get more things to celebrate in the midst of this trying time.”
By James Kleinmann
The Wedding Banquet opens in theaters on Friday, April 18th, 2025 via Bleecker Street.
