More than three decades after the release of director Ang Lee’s romantic comedy The Wedding Banquet, the film is being reimagined with a contemporary twist. The original 1993 feature focused on a bisexual Taiwanese-American man’s elaborate ruse to marry a Chinese woman in need of a green card—a decision that quickly upends his and his boyfriend’s life. The film remains a heartwarming favorite in the queer cinematic canon.
The new iteration is helmed by Fire Island director Andrew Ahn, who also cowrote the screenplay with the original film’s screenwriter James Schamus. In theaters today, it offers a fresh take on the story without losing any of what made it so lovable in the first place.
After unsuccessfully undergoing IVF treatments, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and her partner, Lee (Lily Gladstone), realize that they cannot afford to pay for another round. Meanwhile, their friend Min (Han Gi-chan), the closeted heir apparent of a multinational corporate empire, is approaching the end of his student visa, but he desperately wants to find a way to stay in the U.S. to pursue his artistic ambitions. When his commitment-phobic boyfriend, Chris (Bowen Yang), rejects his proposal, Min instead offers an enticing proposition to Angela, who reluctantly accepts a green-card marriage in exchange for funding another round of Lee’s IVF. But Min and Angela’s plans to quietly elope quickly go up in flames when Min’s skeptical grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) flies in from Korea unannounced, insisting on an all-out wedding extravaganza.
It’s a high-concept premise that immediately appealed to Yang, who first heard that Ahn had gotten Ang Lee’s blessing to remake The Wedding Banquet—a film that Yang and Ahn both consider a seminal part of their coming-of-age—during the making of Fire Island a few years ago. “I was really curious about what his modernization would be because just on a narrative level, it’s like, well, I guess queer marriage is allowed now, so does that leave a huge plot hole open?” Yang tells Harper’s Bazaar. “And the way he presented it to me years later just felt so trenchant in terms of this being a movie about immigration, fertility, parenthood—all these really potentially heavy themes. I was so impressed by the way it’s so light on its feet.”
During a recent joint video call from New York City, Gladstone, Tran, and Yang showed signs of the same cozy, comforting connection that immediately charmed critics when the film debuted at Sundance earlier this year. Below, the costars reflect on the life-changing—and life-affirming—impact of making another worthwhile addition to the modern rom-com canon.
How do you think this film honors the basic structure of Ang Lee’s film while widening the representation of queerness for today’s audience?
Lily Gladstone: I love that the family got bigger and the cast got bigger. When I was telling my circle of loved ones that I was doing this film, they were like, “So … which one are you playing?” They were thinking of Ang Lee’s version. There’s elements of everybody in all [the new characters], but I love that it brings in this element that was found in the first film but is central to this one—the idea of chosen family. I love that the conversation about access, gentrification, and immigration has also been reimagined, because it was such a bedrock of Ang Lee’s as well. It was such a pivotal and important, seminal film for queer representation and storytelling, and adapting the feel of that for the age and the time we’re in while honoring the world that it’s set in, I think, was ... what’s the word?
Bowen Yang: Trenchant. [Laughter] I love that it honors the setup of the comedy of errors. Even though it, as Lily says, expands it, but it also makes it so balanced. It’s on this crazy fulcrum where you’re juggling six, seven, eight characters, basically. It’s just a lot of people to handle. It does it so well.
I think in the original film, maybe what was interesting about it, that might’ve been harder to translate now, is there’s a power imbalance in a lot of ways. In that situation, he’s a landlord, and his partner has to be a little bit subservient throughout the entire film and hide this relationship from the parents, and he has to just be there for him in a way that doesn’t totally feel fulfilling. I feel like this version is much more horizontal. Everyone has some sort of interiority that is really fascinating, but it’s not at the expense of anyone else’s journey. Gi-chan summarizes this movie so well: “Everything happens in this movie because people love each other too much.” So I feel like that’s the added dimension to it.
Kelly Marie Tran: I think there’s also just a wider representation of the queer community in general outside of our four characters, like the scenes when we’re at the bachelorette party. There’s just more people like Kendall as well, which is really exciting.
This film lives and dies by the lived-in connections between your characters. Given that you have probably run in the same industry circles for years, how well did you know each other prior to beginning production in Vancouver, and how did you go about building that chemistry?
LG: We never had any chemistry readings. We met cold, met blind, while we were filming, and that goes to, again, what a gifted director Andrew is, because a huge part of the director’s job is to choose your cast, and he just cast us all on talent and vibes. [Laughs.] It was very easy, and working with Bowen was so meaningful for me. My mom lost a child before she got pregnant with me, so I’ve always had this knowledge of a brother that isn’t here, and because he’s not here, I am; the pregnancies would’ve overlapped. And then one day when we were watching SNL, this little presence of a brother that I’d grown up with, that my mom and I talked about, we recognized in Bowen. Watching SNL, I was like, “That’s him! That’s who we would’ve been.” So in these earthly forms, we’d never met, but Bowen felt like family for a long time from me and my family before he ever knew it. I told Andrew that in our first meeting, and then Andrew told Bowen that, and I’m like, “Oh, I can’t believe you told him that!”
BY: No, it was amazing! I was wrapping Wicked in January the day after Lily won her Golden Globe, and Andrew was like, “I think Lily’s coming on board,” and then I heard about this whole story. I met [Lily’s mom] Betty on the last week of the shoot, and so many things were dialed in so perfectly. Kelly and I just really vibed on the same wavelength within the first couple of days of meeting each other. We love the same pop stars, the same books, the same everything. And then Lily and Kelly met on the first day of shooting Lee and Angela’s scenes, because Lily had just come back from being on the jury at Cannes. So things felt slippery, and yet they landed in such a soft way.
LG: And we started in one of the more coupley moments. The first scene that we shot was after the confrontation in the club, being like, “No, you needed to say that.” It was one of those little coupley moments that is so lived-in, and we had 15 minutes of time to talk about the scene before we shot it. But it’s easy to fall into this dynamic when the casting is good. When you have a group of people that are so mutually supportive, who are so talented and clearly trained in the “yes and” side of improv, lending yourself as a creative and an ensemble—we’re all just cheering each other on.
Lily, the character of Lee could have been played by an actor of any ethnicity, but you were adamant about making her Duwamish, since this story is set in Seattle. Can you tell me about the early conversations you had with your director, Andrew, to modify the character?
LG: I think a lot of the best directors understand that you don’t ignore the gifts of the film gods. You create a tight ship, you create something that will stand on its own legs—but not something that’s so fragile that, as soon as the actors start infusing it with their reality, it starts wavering. It only gets better; it only gets more recognizable to an audience because it’s based in truth. Indigenizing Lee was a big part of that for me. It’s important to me because there are a number of Indigenous actors that have occupied huge places in music and film, in every major art form, but their Indigeneity is something that if they could pass [as white], they just ignored. I feel like it’s an important time to reinfuse that and make a statement about [how] we are everywhere.
Lee had a chance to be silly and goofy and let it go a little bit, but she very much was a straight man to the chaos that the rest of the house brings. So [I thought about] deepening that groundedness: “It’s important to hang onto this home, not just because it’s a home for my family to live in and it was inherited from my father, but because it’s on my ancestral land where I’m from.” Choosing to make the character Duwamish—I mean, that just started with changing the name. It felt a little too on-the-nose to be playing a part of a lesbian couple named Liz. I felt like that was maybe a little bit of a lazy name grab. [Laughs.] So I called Andrew out on that in our first meeting.
BY: No offense to the lesbians out there named Liz!
LG: Absolutely not!
KMT: We love you!
LG: Liz-les representation!
BY: It just was not this character.
LG: Yeah. But there also are a lot of lesbian couples—my neighbors down the street, Mary and Mary, who share the same name. So we thought that would be a fun component to fold in. Lee came from a shortening of Angeline, named after Chief Seattle’s daughter, Princess Angeline. Chief Seattle was a Duwamish chief when the treaties were signed, who Seattle is named after, yet the Duwamish still don’t have federal recognition [of their land rights]. So I thought it was a good opportunity to bring a Duwamish presence and a statement onscreen. And then when we were filming, we realized that our “ship” name is Ang Lee! [Laughs.] That was one of those film-god gifts.
Even though the wedding ceremony in this film is ultimately a sham, Andrew worked painstakingly to honor the specificities of Korean culture. As people who aren’t of that culture, what do you remember from the process of filming the marriage ceremony? What stands out to you?
LG: The most special thing that I think we all witnessed during the wedding—because it is an emotional, very wonderful thing to witness—is there’s just protocol for everything. You see the officiant of the wedding in the film, and I love that it’s always a woman who’s overlooking and making sure the ceremony is going appropriately. There was this moment where she and Yuh-jung recognized each other because they’d gone to high school together, so they greeted each other, let the rest of us in on it, and there was just this moment where everybody just applauded and saw these two old friends, just by complete fate and happenstance, get reintroduced at this wedding.
Gi-chan was so nervous about being in North America for the first time, performing in English for the first time. There were several times where he would be so surprised if any of us knew anything about Korean culture. And then seeing that there is such an intact Korean community in Vancouver—there are such intact Korean communities in North America—that he could find people to talk with, he could see elements of home in this new environment he was in. I can’t imagine what that would be like, being in his position, taking on such a big role as your first English-speaking role. I love the undertones of it in this film—the diaspora that communities have, that immigrant families have—but then also seeing how the community remains. It felt like a really deep and meaningful moment, beyond being just such a charming and fun one.
KMT: It was such a special day, and I remember at the beginning of it, Andrew came out, and we were all dressed up, and he was so emotional. I don’t think I can even describe that moment, just because there’s so few moments in a career when you get to work with someone who’s so passionate about what they’re doing and then also vulnerable enough to be sharing that experience with you before you get to bring their script to life.
BY: Andrew says that he didn’t even realize until that day that we started shooting those wedding scenes that part of why it was so emotional for him was because he realized that he was able to give his parents, who were there and visiting the set at the time, a Korean wedding in a way that he as a gay man didn’t think he could. He let that dream go for a long time, and then it came back to him in a way that is so tied to his craft and his talent—and that was really special. For all of us, as non-Koreans, I think it still hit us that there was so much meaning and beauty in the artifice of a ceremony like that. Even though we were doing a facsimile of a Korean wedding, it was still something that we honored. We stayed in the Hanboks, we stayed in our garments, and we made sure to maintain them and to be very careful. It was a really beautiful, delicate experience.
LG: And it was true, depending on who you asked about the chestnuts and the jujubes, people had different opinions about whether they [represent] boys or girls. [Laughs.]
Kelly, you unexpectedly came out as queer to a journalist who was doing a set visit on the day that you shot the wedding. Did you always know you were going to come out, or was that a spur-of-the-moment decision? How do you reflect on that decision now?
KMT: I really think, in general, it’s a privilege to be an actor at all, to be a person that makes a living off of thinking about bigger themes in your own life and being able to use that in your art. And when everything lines up and you get to make something and use what you’re dealing with in real life, it’s just so special. But I definitely did not plan to come out at all. It was the day of the Korean wedding, and Vanity Fair was on set that day, and I remember the first question I was asked was, “What are you excited about?” I said, “I’m really excited to tell a queer story as a queer person.” And then I was like, “Oh, God, I don’t know if I want to say that.”
And what was really special about the whole thing—this has never happened to me before, but the journalist was like, “If you don’t want that in there, we don’t have to put that in there.” I had three months to think about it. And over that time, I just remember reflecting on how magical it was to be making a film with people that I loved, celebrating this part of my identity that I had not yet learned to celebrate, if that makes sense. And it just felt really natural to be like, “You know what? I’m not hiding this part of myself. I want to celebrate it.” What a privilege to be able to do that in the context of this movie that I got to make with the best people.
BY: What a chic way to come out. [Laughter.] “I’m excited to tell a queer story as a queer person.” In high school, I was just like, “I like boys!” This was so much better!
All three of you have been the first to accomplish something in predominantly white spaces: Bowen is the first Chinese American on SNL, Lily is the first Native American woman to win a Golden Globe and be nominated for an Oscar, and Kelly is the first Asian American woman to have a major role in a Star Wars film. How have you navigated the pressure and expectation that comes with being “the first”?
LG: I think from my vantage, it is so easy to make Indigenous people a monolith. So I think [about] adopting the position that you’re the first, not the last. You are also, in a lot of ways, not the first; you’re standing on the shoulders of a lot of people that have done a lot of work for you. You’re not representing all—you’re representing yourself—but you do so in a way that tries to bring some important attention to aspects of your community that are absolutely ignored. I think the only way that I personally could have survived any of it—because it’s so much pressure—is to view it truly the way that I was raised. This is not just mine. This is ours; this is a communal thing. And it’s a moment that opens the door for other people and normalizes our presence. Like any other major resource in the world, be it tangible or not, it’s not to be hoarded. It’s to be distributed.
BY: What’s so nice is that I was for a moment caught up in the tracking of it, right? You can get really granular about this, and I’ve written about this in sketches, and it’s so fun to lampoon, but I feel like it’s especially meaningful on a project like this, where it is not incidental that these are Indigenous and Asian characters, that they’re queer characters. It’s tied to these institutional things that either are in opposition to those identities or are things that help get you to where you want to be in life. I know that sounds a little vague, but for Lee to be Duwamish, for Min to be Korean, for Angela to be Chinese, for Kendall to be nonbinary—these are all incredibly important narrative things that also are some reflection for the audience. So it’s really, really nice with how it’s pulled off in the film. It’s pretty elegant and not super obvious.
LG: Our experience as human beings is always inextricably influenced by what our culture is, and our human experience as characters in this story was very heavily informed by who we are as people, by who we are because of our communities. But it wasn’t like a parade of that. It was not even trying to be an identity piece. It was a situational comedy and just accepted who each character was.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
