After her somber, awards-nominated roles in Killers of the Flower Moon and Under the Bridge, Lily Gladstone has quickly established herself as a top dramatic actress in Hollywood — but she wants you to know she can do comedy, too.
Gladstone makes a rom-com pivot with The Wedding Banquet, starring alongside Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran and Han Gi-chan in a remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 original Taiwanese-American film. Gladstone and Tran play a lesbian couple, with Tran’s character, Angela, agreeing to marry Han’s character, Min — who is dating Yang’s Chris — to get him a green card, in exchange for paying for her IVF treatment. Things quickly get complicated when Min’s grandmother discovers he’s getting married.
For Gladstone, taking on a comedy “felt like a return to origin. I’m naturally kind of a goofy person; when I was a kid and thought I had any inclination to do any of this, I imagined myself in comedy,” she told The Hollywood Reporter at the film‘s L.A. premiere on Monday.
“It was kind of a surprise to people who know me that I ended up being such a subtle dramatic actress, so it really just felt like a chance to stretch my wings and be myself a little bit more,” she continued. “And anybody who knows me well that has seen this film — my best friends who I gave screener links to early on — they’re all like, ‘This is the most Lily character of all your characters.’”
Gladstone said she “absolutely” wants to do more comedy, and Yang confirmed, “She is so deeply funny. She can do it all.” Writer-director Andrew Ahn noted that in casting her, “I had seen interviews with Lily where I was like, ‘Oh, she’s a goofball, she’s funny.’ And I get that she has such an incredible presence that people cast her in these dramas but I was so excited to get to work with her where she could be funny and dorky and cute.”
Ahn, who previously helmed Fire Island and Driveways, was given the idea to remake The Wedding Banquet and felt an immediate connection with the material, since the 1993 movie was the first gay film he ever saw. In updating it for 2025, he “thought about how much has changed for the queer community” when it comes to marriage and having children.
“As a huge fan of the original I went in with the expectation that it would just be an updated retelling,” Yang echoed. “I was surprised and I was also so blown away by how necessarily modernized it was because marriage is, for now, legal for queer people and you have to sort of work around the plot holes of the original to make sure it works and it’s solid and makes narrative sense today.”
The group also weighed in releasing the film in the current political climate, as Ahn admitted “it’s so scary and there’s so much anxiety about queer people and people of color and our identities not being recognized or supported. And so my hope is that this film can offer people the opportunity to be vulnerable and open themselves up to art and use that to heal, use that to gain strength so that we can go out there and protect the ones we love.”
Tran added, “I think it’s really, really special to be part of a film that gets to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community at a moment in time when it’s being attacked viscerally. It’s hard to hold both truths at one time but I’m grateful to be here, hopefully showing the queer community some joy in the middle of this time.”
The Wedding Banquet hits theaters on Friday.
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