Kelly: Warrior Princess

Star Wars actress takes a leading turn in Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon

2021-03-09 - ★

If the remarkable life and times of Kelly Marie Tran were a Disney movie, the opening scene would not spotlight the young, hungry unknown hustling to yet another postcollege audition in her Honda Civic, or the multi-hyphenate talent being plucked from relative obscurity to become the most prominent actress of colour in a

Star Wars film. It would not show the swirl of red-carpet events for The Last Jedi she posted on social media, or the vile online abuse that followed.

Instead, the opening shot would zoom in on Tran as a bright-faced kindergarten singer, performing in her church choir and getting struck by something more lifealtering than any radioactive Disney/Marvel spider. This was when and where she was first bitten by the performance bug.

Tran, 32, is best known globally for playing mechanic Rose Tico in the most recent Star Wars trilogy. And with this weekend’s release of Disney’s animated

Raya and the Last Dragon, the talents of Tran will be on full display in a title role, as she deploys her trained voice in an emotionally resonant performance.

Several years ago, internet harassment surrounding Star Wars left her recalling the social messages she had internalised for years: that she “existed only in the background” of other’s stories. Now, Raya marks Tran’s first major feature film as the lead — in which she is proud to be “honouring this part of the world” by playing the first Disney princess of Southeast Asian descent.

In Raya, Tran’s character — more Disney warrior than throwback Disney princess, the filmmakers emphasise — is entrusted by her father to become guardian of a supernatural gem. After a cataclysmic event, she spends much of the movie trying to reunite with Dad in a fantastical land (Kumandra) inspired by countries and cultures in Southeast Asia.

In real life, Tran’s father and mother, as refugees from Vietnam, landed in Southern California prepared to sacrifice so that their children might bloom in America.

Tran’s family took root in a San Diego bedroom community running through a gently sloping valley. More than two decades ago, when Tran slept in Little Mermaid sheets, the freeway running fast to the beach did not yet go through. Even her high school had not been built. Theirs was a life under construction from the ground up. “My parents gave up everything just to make sure that I was in a place where we had food on the table and a roof over my head,” Tran says from Los Angeles during a Zoom interview last week. Her folks struggled to assimilate as they found service work — as immigrants who got the job done.

Looking back, Tran realises her parents lacked the luxury to dream about other things, so that their children might follow professionally fulfilling lives. Even Tran didn’t think the performance career she wanted to pursue was quite possible. In some ways, she says, it felt impossible.

“When I’m in a position of being able to celebrate successes, the one thing I want to do the most is share those with my community.”

KELLY MARIE TRAN Actress

Yet her ambition grew as her community did. She studied voice and drama and piano in high school when not serving frozen yoghurt in a local shop. And an older singer from the area, Adam Lambert, soon found his way to fame.

When asked about Tran’s teenage years, her Westview High educators unfurl a string of superlatives: Energetic. Positive. Likeable. Humorous. Hard-working. Tran performed in all-state honour choir competitions and musical director Doreen McCarty recounts Tran’s turn as Miss Adelaide in a production of Guys and Dolls: “Her sense of character and comedic timing were spot on.”

Tran made her way to Palomar College and then UCLA, singing in a cappella groups. She created videos for CollegeHumor, studied improv with the Upright Citizens Brigade and joined the all-Asian American female improv troupe Number One Son. She also took a nonperformance job in creative recruiting.

“I wasn’t thinking about what my career would potentially be,” Tran says — everything was about the next step, the next day, the next gig. She was working up to 45 hours a week.

For all her talent, she wasn’t dreaming too big: “My best-case scenario: I thought I would play the quirky friend on a sitcom.”

Yet also in Tran’s mental make-up: She had adored tough Disney princesses for years, especially the animated Mulan: “She was the first [Disney] warrior who looked like me. Seeing myself represented for the first time — at age 9 — I couldn’t put into words what it meant to me.”

When at 26 she got the shot to play a Disney space warrior, the Rebel mechanic in The Last Jedi, the casting felt like a once-distant wish fulfilled. “That whole experience playing Rose for the first time felt like falling in love for the first time,” she says. “You have no idea what you’re doing — like this beautiful experience that sweeps you off your feet.”

By the time the film was released at the end of 2017, though, she had endured an online barrage of racist and misogynistic remarks. By the following summer, she quit Instagram, writing in her account’s bio, “Afraid, but doing it anyway.”

Later that summer, she wrote a poignant New York Times essay headlined, “I Won’t Be Marginalized by Online Harassment,” disclosing that the comments led her down “a spiral of self-hate.”

Through that crucible, many members of her Star Wars family — including director Rian Johnson and co-stars John Boyega and Mark Hamill — vocalised their support, as did many other celebrities and members of her inner circle. “To have the support of your community is the only way you get [through] this,” she says — the very thing that helped her endure years of leaner times professionally. “Community is still the most important thing now,” she says, smiling in stylish black against a clean pale background. “When I’m in a position of being able to celebrate successes, the one thing I want to do the most is share those with my community.”

Tran says she wasn’t sure exactly why Johnson chose her for Rose, but the filmmaker tells via email that he “felt lucky” to cast her for the same reasons he considers himself fortunate to be her friend: “She has an inner strength and confidence that shines through. It isn’t a tough front or facade, but it takes true strength to own those things and still face the world and say, ‘This is me, I can do this.’ “

And Hamill says via email: “Not only is she a genuinely nice person, she’s a deeply gifted actress. Since she’s only getting started, I can’t wait to see what comes next.”

Tran’s newer supporters include the Raya filmmakers, including directors Don Hall and Carlos Lpez Estrada. The actress says she cherishes that they “cultivated

this space of openness” to let her improvise.

Tran and Hall both point to their first Raya recording session as a pivotal moment that uplifted the rest of the production. Raya has spent six years trying to find a mythical dragon named Sisu (voiced by Awkwafina), and the scene turns confessional as Raya is reduced to her last hope, chanting a tuneful prayer.

Tran suddenly said to her directors: Mind if I try something? “She improvised a lot of what is still in that scene — someone questioning their faith,” says Hall, recounting how Tran infused these new lines with awkwardness and vulnerability, “letting this hardened warrior crack a little bit. We were in tears.”

The actress says that whether they are religious or not, many viewers can relate to feeling so lost that they pray to someone or something for help.

And in the tale of Kelly Tran, that’s how the Disney version of her life might close this act. What began in a church choir as a kindergartner now finds a cinematic bookend in Tran’s 30s, with a role and a prayer. “It feels like an absolute miracle to get to do what I’m doing,” Tran says of her career. “There is lots of dream fulfilment happening.”

ACROSS

1 Hangs around the waist, loosely (5)

6 Deem a sober type (5) 9 Calculate how to keep fit (4,3)

10 Does it house the Citizens’ Advice Bureau? (5) 11 Ointment you can figure to get in a sale? (5)

12 A number can be hot stuff (5)

13 Flier associable with Chekhov (7)

15 She puts us back right on the map (3)

17 The maid’s less than mannerly (4)

18 So cops are upset by stories (6)

19 Stick to the glass (5) 20 Ancient citizen it’s hard work to be like (6)

22 A bit of a nasty eye (4) 24 It’s even poetic in its brevity (3)

25 Playing for England, he obviously knows how to cut (7) 26 A Caledonian, royal on occasion (5)