Kelly Marie Tran: Surviving Star Wars Bullying, Representation, and Raya and the Last Dragon

March 3, 2021, 6:58 PM, GMT

Kelly Marie Tran looks stunning gracing the cover of the latest edition of The Hollywood Reporter, and she discusses how she survived intense Star Wars bullying, and how she has emerged stronger and surer as a person.

Kelly Marie Tran’s first recording session for Raya and the Last Dragon involved a leap of faith. As the titular warrior princess, she stood in a booth in Disney Animation’s Burbank offices and performed the dialogue, an incantation meant to awaken a mythical creature that could help save the world.

The taping went smoothly, but right before the scene wrapped, Tran spoke up: “Hey, actually … would you mind if I tried something?”

She explained to the directors, Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada, that if she were in Raya’s situation — having extended a gesture of friendship, only to invite a world-ending betrayal — she would feel a lot more conflicted, almost chagrined at reaching out with no guarantee anyone would respond. They told her to go for it.

“We really — we really need your help,” Tran murmurs as Raya, alone in a cave. “To be honest, I need your help. I made a mistake. I trusted someone I shouldn’t have. And now the world’s broken,” she said, her trembling words in a near-whisper.

Says López Estrada, “There were five or six of us in the booth on the other side, and we all had tears in our eyes.”

The final cut features Tran’s own words. “[Raya] sees the world in this doe-eyed idyllic way, and then the world sort of breaks, and it changes the way in which she interacts with the world,” she says now, just before the film’s March 5 release in theaters and on Disney+. “That was my way [into the character]. I’ve definitely in the past viewed the world through rose-colored glasses, and now I feel like I’m in the back, smoking a cigarette, [saying], ‘I’ve seen things.’ ”

When the world first met Tran, she was the girl who had won a golden ticket — and wanted to bring everyone along on her tour of the chocolate factory. The unknown actor who had catapulted from improv stages to Star Wars, the biggest movie franchise in the world, met her moment with pinch-me glee. She felt grateful to be chosen.

Not that she was some starry-eyed naïf. As prerelease publicity for Episode VIII — The Last Jedi got underway, she started an Instagram account and used it to poke holes in the Hollywood mythos that makes the unfamous feel like lesser mortals. “I never thought I’d be in a world where someone would pay for people to dress me, do my hair, do my makeup. We spend our whole lives trying to hold ourselves up to a standard that is truly unattainable,” Tran wrote in the caption to an October 2017 post in which she juxtaposed a red carpet photo with a snapshot of herself posing on the street in a Jaws T-shirt and novelty oversized glasses. “This chick on the left is who I am 1% of the time. That girl on the right is who I am 99% of the time. And you know what? They’re both worthy of love.”

“TBH, this is the only way to behave when you become famous,” BuzzFeed declared in an article celebrating her account in December 2017, a week before The Last Jedi‘s premiere.

Everyone knows what happened after the movie came out. Rian Johnson’s vision of a galaxy far, far away divided obsessive fans, and Tran, as the franchise’s most prominent newcomer and first woman of color in a lead role, bore the brunt of the haters’ ire. (John Boyega and Daisy Ridley faced similar harassment when they were introduced in Episode VII.) They polluted her feed with racist and sexist insults, she deleted all her posts, and by the time The Rise of Skywalker premiered in December 2019, the girl who happy-cried her way down her first red carpet two years earlier had been replaced by a woman who stared down the cameras at the El Capitan Theatre, lips sealed in a defiant pout.

It wouldn’t be a surprise to find Tran, now 32, closed off and unwilling to engage with a public that returned her goodwill with bile, so it’s a relief instead to peer through a Zoom screen and find her barefaced, smiling and game to process the unique set of life experiences that brought her from obscurity to Star Wars trailblazer to Disney princess, attended by dual torrents of intense scrutiny and toxic fandom.

Tran’s decision to wipe her Instagram — all that remains is a one-line bio: “Afraid, but doing it anyway” — in June 2018 made headlines, to her consternation. “What’s interesting to me about working in this industry is that certain things become so public, even if you don’t really mean them to be, [like] the succession of events in which I left the internet for my own sanity,” she says. “It was basically me being like, ‘Oh, this isn’t good for my mental health. I’m obviously going to leave this.’ ”

At the time, she was in the final week of production for the first season of the Facebook Watch drama Sorry for Your Loss, a meditation on grief in which she plays a recovering alcoholic. “She was very candid about being in a real uncharted territory,” says creator Kit Steinkellner of their conversations on the CBS Radford lot in Studio City. “It’s a rare and awful thing to have that level and volume of hate come at you so relentlessly. I was really impressed with how she dealt head-on with the intense and complicated feelings that anybody would have about this, while continuing to really give as an artist and friend and human.” (Steinkellner likens Tran’s performance to a chiaroscuro painting — “all the lights and the darks.”)

Tran says the whole experience felt like she “fell in love very publicly and then very publicly had an embarrassingly horrible breakup.” She leaned on her tight-knit pre-fame circle of friends, including the members of her all-Asian American female improv troupe Number One Son, and went to therapy, where she learned, “If someone doesn’t understand me or my experience, it shouldn’t be my place to have to internalize their misogyny or racism or all of the above. Maybe they just don’t have the imagination to understand that there are different types of people living in the world.”

Other than an op-ed in The New York Times, in which she penned an assertive, moving declaration of renewed purpose to combat the “lies” that society teaches about women and people of color, Tran also withdrew from the spotlight altogether.

“I left. I said no to a lot of things,” she says. “It felt like I was just hearing the voice of my agents and my publicity team and all of these people telling me what to say and what to do and how to feel. And I realized, I didn’t know how I felt anymore. And I didn’t remember why I was in this in the first place.

“Any time that happens, I have to close up shop and go away for a while and really interact in the real world — read books and journal and go on hikes and look at a tree and remind myself that there was a fire that burned inside of me before Star Wars, before any of this. And I needed to find that again.”