Take Your Seats for ‘The Wedding Banquet,’ a Modern and Starry Queer Rom-Com

On a crisp June morning in Vancouver, Andrew Ahn can barely get a word out before bursting into tears. The director of The Wedding Banquet, a reimagination of Ang Lee’s 1993 queer rom-com classic, has gathered his cast and crew to outline the day of shooting ahead of them, when they’ll finally be realizing the wedding that inspired Ahn to undertake this ambitious film in the first place. The costumes were handmade in Korea and sent to Canada just days earlier. The woman portraying the officiant actually officiates traditional Korean weddings. Ahn’s parents are here, beaming with pride.

Just as in the original Wedding Banquet, the ceremony is technically a sham—but the details suck you right in anyway. “I take today really seriously,” Ahn tells me later. “Even if it’s a fake wedding in a movie, the ritual is so important.”

His weepy if confident direction of the wedding scenes shows the truth of this idea. “Seeing my brother getting married, I was wondering as a gay man if I would ever have anything like that—would the culture allow a queer version of this?” Ahn says. “This was my way of having a Korean wedding—to make a movie about it.” By the end of my day here, I’ll see several other Wedding Banquet creatives go to similarly vulnerable places, both on and off camera.

The clock hasn’t even struck noon, for instance, when an emotional Kelly Marie Tran decides to share a personal detail on the record for the first time. “I haven’t said this publicly yet, but I’m a queer person,” she tells me. “The thing that really 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 before.”

A little later in our conversation, she starts to sniffle, her eyes watering: “I haven’t done this in a while. I’m getting freaking emotional over here.” She’s allowed, of course. Weddings tend to bring up a lot.

Shot and situated in New York, Lee’s original Wedding Banquet follows a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant named Wai-Tung who lives with his boyfriend. Exhausted by his conservative parents’ persistent nosiness around his love life, Wai-Tung marries a woman from mainland China who’s in need of a green card, an arrangement he hopes will allow him to live his life in peace. Naturally, his parents travel from Taiwan to throw him a traditional wedding banquet, forcing Wai-Tung, his “roommate,” and his new bride to perform an elaborate, extensive charade—one that inevitably reveals core truths about their fraught, if loving, relationships with one another.

The 1993 film was produced in part by Oscar nominee James Schamus, who also backs Ahn’s modern update, set to hit theaters in the spring. (Schamus cowrote the screenplay with Ahn too.) Set in Seattle, this version has a fuller ensemble, telling a larger story about a chosen family. Angela (Tran) and her girlfriend, Lee (Lily Gladstone), are trying to have a baby through IVF; their best friends, Chris (Bowen Yang) and his partner Min (Han Gi-chan), live in their guesthouse. While Angela and Lee struggle to decide whether to pay for another round of fertility treatments, Min faces pressure to go back to his native Korea to take over the family business. A wedding plot is hatched: Angela will fake-marry Min in a traditional Korean ceremony. That way, she can raise funds for IVF while he secures a green card—and creates a sheen of old-fashioned respectability for back home.

“Weddings are intensely important markers in the growth of your relationships, even fake ones,” Ahn says. “Through the process of planning it, of going through it, you grow in your relationships.” The scheme tests the very tight bond between Yang’s Chris and Tran’s Angela. It prods Chris to consider his own commitment to Min. And it intensifies Lee and Angela’s plans to raise children. “You can’t whoopsie-daisy a baby in the way that straight people can,” Ahn says.

The cast has been working together for a few weeks by now, and an intense feeling of community defines the set—between takes, over lunch, even down in video village. “The four of us claimed each other so quickly. There’s space for everybody to try things, to have fun, to just bounce off of each other,” says Oscar nominee Gladstone, who’s thrilled to be doing some comedy after the heavy one-two punch of Killers of the Flower Moon and Under the Bridge. “If I were to put a word around it, it’s ‘precious.’ Everybody feels precious to each other.”

They’ve formed a similar bond with Ahn and the crew. Late in the morning, Gladstone comes to find Ahn’s parents sitting in director’s chairs, wearing bulky headsets and smiling with anticipation. “He’s handsome like you,” Gladstone says to Ahn’s father, before snapping a selfie with Ahn’s mom. “Your son is so wonderful.”

The original Wedding Banquet offered a radically realist portrait of gay joy and pain, and three decades later, it holds up well. “It reminded me of being out to my parents while my parents were saying the same thing of like, ‘Well, maybe when he finds the right woman, it’ll make sense,’ or ‘If he has a child, then it’ll make sense,’” says Yang, who previously worked with Ahn on the Emmy-nominated rom-com Fire Island. Ahn wanted to make a contemporary film in that vein, honoring the original’s tough, specific insights while recognizing changes in queer visibility and traditions. “I was really focused on trying to tell a story that felt reflective of the community as I’ve experienced it growing up,” he says. Tran adds, “The spirit is the same, and I think it’s even more queer.”

This also leads to complex, surprising dynamics with the family who fly in for Min and Angela’s big day. Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung (Minari) plays Min’s grandmother, who essentially raised him; upon landing in Seattle, she makes it grudgingly clear she knows her grandson is gay and that she’s arrived for a farce she doesn’t fully understand. Angela has a strained relationship with her own mother (Joan Chen), but she’s not being rejected because of her sexuality—actually, her mom is a PFLAG-chapter-running ally who has to wrap her head around her gay daughter marrying a guy. “I came out to my mom in a very specific experience,” Tran says. “The scenes that I have with Joan Chen in this movie are very similar to the experience that I had.”

This Wedding Banquet cast makes the most of their weekends up north together. A few days ago, Tran, Yang, Gladstone, and Han went for an afternoon hike through the Vancouver wilderness. They grabbed an early dinner. Then they went to see a Korean choir perform Mamma Mia! songs at a nearby club. “It’s just one big cuddle,” Gladstone says.

While the bulk of the main cast is well-known to American audiences—Yang from Saturday Night Live, Tran from the Star Wars films, Gladstone coming off of her groundbreaking Killers of the Flower Moon Oscar campaign—this is Han’s first English-language project. In fact, the film marked his first-ever audition in English. He’s only been acting professionally for a few years, having broken out in the queer 2020 web series Where Your Eyes Linger, but he feels reasonably confident in the language, having been raised on The Simpsons and SpongeBob SquarePants (and, okay, he started English lessons from a very young age). “Everyone’s famous here,” Han says to me with a laugh, in full wedding garb. “It’s incredible that I am here.” For added context: This is Han’s first time in North America.

Today’s shoot leans heavily on Han and Tran. A crane looms over them in the University Women’s Club of Vancouver, whose century-old clubhouse provides the set for the wedding and reception. It’s a tight space, and the crew must move inch by inch, take after take, to elegantly capture the characters, wearing their formal costumes, in the procession. Youn recognizes the woman playing the film’s officiant: They went to high school together. The two reunite before the officiant resumes checking the set, making sure its depiction of a traditional Korean wedding is accurate: “Where’s the cup?”

After lunch, Ahn rehearses for the filming of the Pyebaek, a wedding custom featuring formal bowing and the catching of jujubes and chestnuts, which symbolize children. The sequence is played for big laughs here, since Angela doesn’t have a clue as to how it should work, and Min’s grandmother—the character charged with throwing the items into Angela’s wedding skirt—is not taking this particular custom too seriously. Youn looks around the room as filming gets started, preparing to throw way too many jujubes and chestnuts, over and over. “I’m scared,” she deadpans. The tossing gets a little chaotic.

“Hearing the music and seeing the colors and the cohesion of symbols—it’s remarkable,” Gladstone says. With each take of this specific scene, we see Youn, Tran, Chen, and Han get more and more comfortable—and funnier. Adds Gladstone, “You have hardship, you have generational trauma, you have some very relatable issues that people will resonate with—there are some very touching and emotional moments in this film. But it’s a comedy, favoring light and laughter, and life and love. And we do what good improvers do. You just say yes. You just lean into what the other person’s doing, and it’s really, really silly.”

All of this feels like a preamble for the final big scene of the day: the vomiting. Tran and Han have been preparing for this moment, when Min carries Angela as he walks in a circle, watched by all of their loved ones. Then she gets ever so slightly nauseous. A carafe of oatmeal rests beside the camera, set to stand in for the vomit. One crew member asks, “Andrew, are you cueing the puke?” while Tran requests, “Nobody make me laugh.” It’s decided that she will vomit in Han’s ear.

“I was asking, ‘Are you vomiting for 10 [takes]?’” Han says before they get started. “I’ve never done a vomiting scene before. But yeah, it will be an experience. We’ll see how it feels in my ear.” Tran tells me she offered a suggestion: “I’m very excited about throwing up in his ear, but I also was like, ‘Can we please get him earplugs?’ I don’t want him to actually feel any.”

It’s not an overstatement to say that no one—the actors who are filming, their castmates watching from afar, the producers and assistants and all the rest keeping things running—can resist cracking up as the sequence unfolds. It’s fitting that this day has started and ended with different kinds of tears, from emotional reflection to uproarious laughter.

As the sun starts setting, as Ahn pushes to get what he needs before losing his light, as Han’s ear keeps getting wiped down for any trace of leftover oatmeal, I go back to something Tran told me when we first started chatting: “You’re here for a very special day.” This turns out to be true. But it also seems to be just how life on The Wedding Banquet works. Tomorrow, they’ll surely be laughing and crying together again—on camera, and off.