When Joan Chen was in her early 20s she met with the director Ang Lee about starring in his 1993 film “The Wedding Banquet,” a New York-set rom-com about a Taiwanese American in a relationship with another man who marries a woman in need of a green card. Chen was a star in China but had recently moved to Los Angeles, and was intrigued.
“Getting married for a green card was something we all kind of thought about,” she said during a recent video interview from her home in San Francisco. “I had such a wedding myself. So it’s a great story.” (She has since remarried.)
But it took years to get the funding and Chen never ended up playing the role of the bride. The actress, who turns 64 this month, plays the bride’s mother in the remake directed by Andrew Ahn, in theaters April 18.
“I feel like it’s some sort of a karma, it’s some sort of a closure,” she said, her voice growing almost wistful. “It’s also interesting, time passing yet we’re all still here. So fortunate. What a wonderful thing.”
The details of her character, May Chen, are a sign of the changing times: Rather than denying the sexuality of her daughter Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), May is a vocal L.G.B.T.Q. ally who gets down with lion dancers and a drag queen. Angela agrees to marry the boyfriend (Han Gi-chan) of her best friend (Bowen Yang) when the groom agrees to pay for in vitro fertilization treatments for the bride’s girlfriend (Lily Gladstone), in exchange for a chance to stay in the United States.
May is a funny, heartbreaking role that won Chen raves at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and it comes as she is in the midst of a career revival that began with her Independent Spirit Award-nominated performance in “Didi” (2024). In that coming-of-age story, directed by Sean Wang, she played the beleaguered mother of an awkward 13-year-old boy. For decades, Chen had all but given up on the U.S. film industry, choosing to work mainly in China, where she got her start when she was only 14. Now Hollywood is calling her back with more nuanced, sometimes silly, parts that show off her range. She’ll follow up “The Wedding Banquet” with “Oh. What. Fun.,” a Michael Showalter-directed Christmas comedy opposite Michelle Pfeiffer.
“I’m, in a way, becoming a character actor,” she said. “These were parts that I never thought about when I was younger. I always was a tragic person.”
Which is not to say that Chen’s career has been predictable. Raised in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, she won China’s Hundred Flowers Award for best actress when she was just a teenager. Even after she moved to the United States, she thought of acting as a “Plan B,” but she eventually got her breakthrough role as the opium-addicted empress in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning “The Last Emperor.”
A generation of David Lynch fans know her as the mill owner Josie Packard on “Twin Peaks”; Fewer people might realize she also directed the Winona Ryder-Richard Gere weepy “Autumn in New York” (2000) following her 1999 directing debut “Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl,” which she made in her home country in secret. Last year, she published an acclaimed Chinese nonfiction book about her family’s history.
She initially started to explore forms of creative expression other than acting when she felt she had fewer roles coming her way.
“It was a different era,” she said. “The parts that I played I’m considered this beautiful, exotic flower type, and by mid-30s, of course, this flower is wilted.” (Chen is being a little modest: The director Alice Wu said in a phone interview that she thought at first that Chen was too beautiful to play the pregnant mother in her 2005 film “Saving Face.”)
But Tran, Chen’s screen daughter in “The Wedding Banquet,” said that Chen is anything but jaded. “She has such a sense of childlike wonder that I feel is hard to come by when you’ve been in this industry for an amount of time and you’re a woman of color,” Tran said in a video call.
That joy manifested during the first rehearsal when Ahn brought the queer lion dance troupe to work with the actors. May’s enthusiasm is meant to be deeply embarrassing for Angela, who believes her mother’s advocacy is a way of erasing her own flaws as a parent.
“Joan and the lion dance troupe, they were like, ‘Let’s bump and grind, let’s have the lion lick her butt,’” Ahn said. “Joan was so into it. No embarrassment, no shame, like she went for it.”
Chen acknowledges that she has a “kooky side,” but in conversation she’s soft-spoken and deliberate with her words. Behind her is a bookcase adorned with framed photographs of her children. Motherhood, and the difficulties associated with it, have been a theme throughout Chen’s recent work as well as in her own life.
“When my daughters were in their teens, there were some really very tumultuous times that we all had to learn and live through and so, in a way, I put my career on hold,” she said.
Wang said that he cast Chen in “Didi” in part because she was able to embody the identities of both a “movie star and an immigrant mom.” And Chen said that the film not only brought renewed attention to her acting, but also felt like a “cathartic, redemptive experience for my motherhood.” Her daughter Audrey Hui, also an actress, joined her on set, occasionally serving as her stand-in.
Chen has found herself frequently playing a fictionalized version of a filmmaker’s mother — not just in “Didi,” but also in “Saving Face” and, to a certain extent, now in “The Wedding Banquet.” When she and Ahn first had a conversation over Zoom, they mostly spoke about their own families rather than the details of the movie. Still, her personal connection was vital to her performance.
“It has been an ongoing learning curve, an ongoing lesson, and a lot of regrets in my own being a mother, the kind of pain and suffering in situations that you actually get to use in your work which is very cathartic, healing in a way,” she said. “In ‘Wedding Banquet’ she evidently hurt her child very much, and I do realize that even with the best of intentions and the most fierce love you are clueless.”
Chen’s own experience also heightened the tenderness of her performance. Tran remembered being stunned when, during an emotional scene, Chen, unscripted, reached over and wiped the snot from running from her fictional daughter’s nose. Chen was nonchalant about that decision.
“It comes naturally for a mother,” Chen said. “So I felt it was the right choice.”
Chen’s recent success has also reminded her of the parts of the Hollywood machine she doesn’t like. She’s not a fan, for instance, of laborious press tours. “It’s so against my personality,” she said. “I’m more of a loner. I stay at home. I read a book. I’m a bit antisocial.”
She does, however, have a renewed energy. She attributes that to a phone call she had on her 60th birthday with her own mother, who at the time was hospitalized with cancer.
“I thought by 30 I should be done, but at 60 all of a sudden I woke up,” she said. “I think everything that I’ve been doing from that day on is pointing me to something to say. Before I leave this Earth, there is something I’m yet to do.”
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