Star Wars star Kelly Marie Tran comes out as queer

Kelly Marie Tran, who is best known for playing Rose Tico in two Star Wars films, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, has come out publicly as queer.

The actor spoke out about her sexuality during a recent interview with Vanity Fair to promote her new film The Wedding Banquet – which is a remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 queer rom-com of the same name directed by Andrew Ahn.

“I haven’t said this publicly yet, but I’m a queer person,” she revealed. Tran also explained how excited she was to play a queer person in the The Wedding Banquet.

“The thing that 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.”

The Wedding Banquet follows a gay man named Min who marries a woman named Angela who needs a green card in order to placate his conservative, Taiwanese parents. He thinks it’ll be easy to fool them but when his parents travel from Taiwan to throw him a traditional wedding banquet, the pair are forced to pretend they are together despite both having relationships of the same-sex.

Tran plays Angela while Min is played South Korean actor Han Gi-Chan. They will be joined by Lilly Gladstone playing Angela’s girlfriend Lee and Bowen Yang – fresh off his success in Wicked – as Min’s boyfriend Chris.

Tran said she felt very connected to her character, particularly in the way their coming out journeys mirrored each other’s.

“I came out to my mom in a very specific experience. The scenes that I have with [Angela’s mother] Joan Chen in this movie are very similar to the experience that I had,” she said.

Even before Tran came out, she was a vocal supporter of the LGBTQ+ community and previously expressed how much she wanted more LGBTQ+ representation in future Disney projects after she appeared in Raya and the Last Dragon as Raya – whom many fans thought was queer too.

Speaking to Vanity Fair at the time, she said: “There’s a lot of work to be done in that respect. I’d love to see a Disney warrior who – I don’t know, can I say this without getting in trouble? I don’t care – is openly in the LGBTQ+ community.”

The Wedding Banquet will be released in 2025.