The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I felt the world wouldn’t let me…’
As the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, Kelly Marie Tran feared that acting was an ‘insane’ ambition. Now she’s a Disney princess
When Kelly Marie Tran was working the Hollywood audition circuit, she kept a suitcase in her car boot full of frumpy clothes. They were the kind of things she thought a lead character’s unattractive best friend might wear – bright, unflattering tops, boot-cut jeans and so on – and she’d change into them before driving to screen tests from her office job in western Los Angeles.
Tran, the daughter of Vietnam War refugees, had decided in her teens that her future as an actress lay in comic bit parts, though not because these were a lifelong ambition. “Honestly, I didn’t even think I was that funny,” she says on a video call from her LA apartment. “But I saw that the only people who were working that looked like me were playing those roles.
“There’s a part of me that loves comedy. There’s also a part of me that decided to focus on it knowing that maybe one day, by some miracle, I might get to be the sidekick on a sitcom. That was as high as my dreams got, because that was as high as I felt the world would let me go.”
Now her dreams are struggling to keep up. Tran, 32, shot to fame in 2017 after being cast in Star Wars: The Last Jedi as the lion-hearted resistance fighter Rose Tico; next week she returns as the voice of the heroine in Disney’s latest fantasy animation.
Raya and the Last Dragon stars Tran as a young adventurer prising her kingdom from the grip of a squirming, creepily pandemic-like curse. Inspired by southeast Asian folklore, the film reworks the timehonoured Disney princess formula into a rousing and ravishing warrior epic – imagine the studio’s recent seafaring musical Moana with martial arts battles instead of songs.
Tran auditioned for the film in early 2019, but the lead role initially went to the Canadian singer and actress Cassie Steele. Yet in the following months, the character of Raya was significantly rewritten: Steele subsequently left the production, and a few hours before the UK premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker that December, the studio asked Tran if she would like to step in. She quickly said yes.
Then along came Covid. While Disney’s animators left their Burbank headquarters and got to work in their homes around southern California, Tran spent the next few months recording dialogue in her apartment in a makeshift soundproof booth – “really just a fortress of cushions,” she admits.
For obvious reasons, there has been no formal premiere, and when we speak, Tran still hasn’t seen the finished film – which launches on Disney+ next week. With LA still in lockdown, she remains at home, taking painting lessons on Zoom or bingeing old series of The Great British Bake Off (Chetna from 2014 is a favourite).
If circumstances allowed, she’d be almost anywhere else. “These kinds of projects feel so much bigger than me that I need a bit of time to mentally deal with what’s happening,” she explains. After making Star Wars: The Last Jedi, she went to Vietnam for three months, working in an orphanage before flying out her mother and father, Kay and Tony, to join her. It was her first visit to their homeland, and the first time her parents had set foot there since fleeing 40 years beforehand.
Her father had been homeless between the ages of 11 and 19, and one day the three of them cycled to his village together: “It was extraordinary to see my dad walking around the same streets he’d slept on during his childhood,” she says. When her parents arrived in the United States, they settled in San Diego, and throughout Tran’s own childhood, their former lives seldom came up.
“I don’t want to generalise about Asian immigrants, but I think my parents had a mentality of keeping their heads down, getting on and not dwelling on the past,” she says. Her father worked at Burger King and her mother in a funeral home; as a girl, Kelly sang in their local church choir, which kindled an interest in becoming a performer.
“They’re still confused by my career choice,” she laughs. “But at first they were like, what are you doing? It seemed like such an insane, impossible thing to pursue.”
In the early days, an improv troupe Tran founded with friends served her well when it came to securing parts in online sketch shows. But it also stood her in unexpectedly good stead in her first, improv-heavy Star Wars audition – to which she wore a knitted tank top, white shirt and novelty Hogwarts school tie, all pulled from that suitcase in her car boot.
She hadn’t seen a single
Star Wars film beforehand: as per the neckwear, Harry Potter was more her thing. Nevertheless, director Rian Johnson took a shine to her, and after her fifth and final audition in London, he offered her the role of Rose. The operation was so secretive that Tran told her parents she was working on an indie comedy in Canada, a ruse she maintained by taking them home souvenir bottles of maple syrup. The Last Jedi was released to overwhelmingly positive reviews, and became the most commercially successful film of 2017. Nevertheless, a small, toxic puddle of the Star Wars fan base took issue with Tran’s newly prominent presence in “their” beloved franchise, and the ensuing poisonous tide was grim enough to drive her off social media. The abuse had her dwelling again on the thoughts she’d had while driving to auditions – that people like her belonged in the margins of Hollywood, and that she’d somehow ended up in the wrong place through some wrinkle in fate.
“I became caught up in this idea that I had to be grateful all the time – that being in Star Wars was some impossible thing that had been gifted to me and that I was so undeserving of it,” she says. “And it’s taken me a while to recognise that I worked hard for it, and that maybe I am good at what I’m doing, and have something to contribute.”
Even so, her role in the subsequent instalment, 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker was much reduced – a result of director and co-writer JJ Abrams’s decision to keep Rose at Resistance HQ with Carrie Fisher’s General Leia for a subplot that was ultimately cut, after it proved too hard to assemble from the very limited available footage of Fisher that had been shot before her death.
Last September, Tran’s co-star John Boyega criticised Disney and Lucasfilm for shuffling their white castmates to the fore for this final chapter. “You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know f--all,” he said.
Does Tran agree? She pauses for a long time: long enough for an anxious PR to materialise on the line and ask to move on. (“I’m just trying to figure out how to answer,” Tran reassures them.)
“It’s complicated,” she eventually begins. “Star Wars is such a cultural touchstone, and I feel the things that happen in those worlds genuinely matter.” Another pause. “Can I ask what you thought about it?”
I tell her I was sorry not to have seen more of Rose, but thought the story worked well enough on its own terms, so hadn’t read too much into it – though as someone who’d seen people who looked like me in Star Wars since childhood, perhaps it was easy not to.
“Right,” she says. “And I think unconscious bias is a very hard thing to measure, though we’re getting better. So I think what you make of that comes down to your experience – what are you able to see. And we have to realise that we’re all seeing the world through very specific lenses.”
Would she go back to Star Wars – for another film, or perhaps a spinoff series? The question seems to take her aback. “I haven’t thought about it at all, honestly. I feel like Star Wars was a weird fever dream. I don’t know. But I have not had that call.”
The pioneering aspect of Tran’s career is something of which she’s proud, but it also makes her uncomfortable. (Incredibly, when she appeared on the cover of the summer 2017 issue of Vanity Fair – in a costumed group shot with her Star Wars colleagues – she became the first Asian woman to have done so in the history of the magazine.)
“I do my best acting when I’m not thinking about the pressures of it,” she says. “When you start dissecting it, what it all means can get a little heavy in your head. I mean, I almost didn’t pursue acting as a career because I didn’t think it was realistic. Even after Star Wars and Raya, sometimes I still don’t. That’s just the truth.”
‘I got caught up in this idea that Star Wars was gifted to me and I was undeserving of it’
Raya and the Last Dragon will be available on Disney+ with Premier Access from Wednesday
Claire Allfree: Kazuo, your new novel Klara and the Sun is narrated by Klara, an “Artificial Friend”, who has been bought by a mother as a robotic companion for her teenage daughter, Josie. Why did you choose to tell the story from the perspective of a nonhuman figure?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I’ve been drawn to the limitations of a narrator’s viewpoint with all my books. Klara knows very little about the human world but she’s been given this task of helping a teenager not to be lonely so she’s looking at everything through that perspective. Because she’s not human it paradoxically highlights these big questions: What is it to be human? What is love? Do humans need it to alleviate loneliness?
CA: The novel shares an interest in science and identity with Never Let Me Go, your 2005 novel narrated by a cloned woman. Do you see a relationship between the two stories? KI: At the emotional level, Klara was a reply to Never Let Me Go, or at least to the overriding sadness of that novel. As I got older, and cheered up a little, though, I then thought: “Why all this sadness? This is a bit much.”
I suppose when you are younger, pessimism is quite cool. You think: “I’m going to break everyone’s complacency.” I think I was also writing warning letters to myself, about what might happen later on in life’s journey. I was writing about decent well-meaning people who screw up because it’s so easy to do so. As I get older I am quite impressed by human beings. They are capable of great generosity of spirit and courage. So that’s become more my thing: the bleak inescapable backdrop, but the people in the foreground doing their best. Naomi Ishiguro: People often ask me if there is something about you that doesn’t come across in your novels and I think: “Oh yes, a sense of humour.” People don’t expect it because you are always wearing black clothes, writing these desperately sad books and talking about the human condition. But I remember as a child that you would often make funny jokes with my toys by doing their voices, and Klara has a similar limited perspective [to the toys]. The dark comedy in not having a wider perspective on your own life reveals, for me, your humorous side.
KI: Actually, many people don’t understand that a lot of my books are quite funny. The Remains of the Day is meant to be a kind of comedy. And there are some out-and-out comedies in my short story collection Nocturnes.
CA: Naomi, like your father, you studied at the University of East Anglia and your debut novel, Common Ground – about a cross-cultural friendship between two boys: Stan and Charlie – is out next month. In what ways did your father influence you becoming a writer?
NI: Mostly in me just wanting to do it in the first place. The idea of sitting in a room in silence runs absolutely contrary to my nature. But having a writer as a parent gives you a model for what books can do: they give you a voice that carries on into the world; it’s a way of emotionally communicating across all sorts of boundaries. To see the magic of that as a child is amazing. CA: Common Ground explores the prejudice Charlie faces as a member of the Romany community. What drew you to that subject?
NI: The question of who the land of this country belongs to is at the heart of my book. There was a move last year to criminalise trespass, and Romany people are on the front line of this debate.
CA: At one point Stan, who later becomes a journalist, says that stories have the power to transform lives. It suggests a view of the novel as an agent of political change. Do you share that view, Kazuo?
KI: When I was in my 20s a lot of my peers were superficially quite political: they all had lapel badges with slogans on. When I started to write, the expectation from these people was that I would write like Ken Loach. I remember thinking I didn’t want to do this. My early novels are consciously about how difficult it is to understand the politics of your day. My fiction took a deliberate step back even while I was going on CND marches. Writing was the part of me that questioned those certainties.
CA: Klara and the Sun feels very directed against the certainties of Artificial Intelligence and big tech.
KI: AI and genetic technology open up enormous opportunities, like those of the Industrial Revolution. But if we don’t know what to do with these technologies then there are dangers.
CA: Do you fear AI as a challenge to the literary imagination?
NI: I would say no. People turn to fiction for emotional truth and
I don’t think you can get that without self-consciousness.
KI: I’ve had a series of conversations with Demis Hassabis, one of the leading AI minds in the world, about precisely this. I proposed there might be something called Tolstoy 3 that could write great novels. The latest generation of AI works by what’s called reinforcement learning. They are just given a task, like Klara, and they teach themselves. Those AI programmes that defeated world champion chess players used strategies the grandmasters had never dreamt of. I find that prospect very interesting in the context of Tolstoy 3: if it could produce a new kind of novel – never mind
Joyce!
CA: Some people might find that prospect alarming.
KI: Yes, if AI is
g Family business: Kazuo Ishiguro, 66, and his daughter Naomi, 28, both have new novels out next month capable of producing a great work of literature it has a capacity for empathy. And that means it can produce the next great idea, something like Marxism or Democracy. But it could also come up with a new version of Nazism. I find that idea more alarming than the prospect of demon robots taking over the world. It also means it knows how to run an effective political campaign. The moment we get to love works of art by AI, I would also be very concerned that some authoritarian politician is eyeing AI to win the next election.
CA: Has there always been a lot of political chat around the Ishiguro dinner table?
NI: I was brought up very Leftwing and quite politically aware. We definitely talk about these things.
KI: We discuss political issues but I think that politics is a generational thing. Naomi’s generation is much more concerned about climate change, for instance. She’s quite rightly said that’s the problem and that people like me don’t really think about climate change.
NI: It’s not just a political issue; it’s the big existential question of now!
CA: Isn’t Klara and the Sun, on one level, an environmental fable?
KI: It is, but if someone said it was quite a feeble attempt to introduce that to my fiction I wouldn’t defend it. People of my age spent so much time thinking about communism, nuclear war and the aftermath of the Second World War, authoritarian states, how we stop that kind of thing happening. And while I now recognise that climate change is possibly the big challenge that’s going to be at the bottom of all our discussions, I can’t find the energy or the stamina to engage in it. But Naomi is quite right; she has told me it’s staggering how little I think about it.
CA: Both your new novels explore parent-child relationships. Does your own relationship have any bearing on your interest in this?
KI: When Naomi started to write stories my wife Lorna and I neurotically looked through them for references to us. But I don’t think there are any. Naomi is a very different writer to me but neither of us write in the autobiographical tradition. Writers fall into two camps: we are not the Philip Roth category; we are in the Shakespeare camp. I think that’s a safe camp to be in. CA: But does being a father have an emotional bearing on your work? KI: It’s true all my books have parent-child relationships at their heart. Stevens, the butler, has a very important relationship with his father in The Remains of the Day. In my earlier novels often the big relationship is the parent-child one. I’m less interested in the conflicts that could arise as in the fact there is this love in the first place. Nearly all parents seem to have this incredible Schwarzenegger/Terminator style determination to do the best for their child.
CA: Yet you suggest in Klara and the Sun that Klara enables the mother to see Josie as replaceable? KI: To say that you really love someone presupposes that they have a soul that makes them unique and which can’t be transferred to somebody else. That if they die that’s it.
In Klara, there is the sense that the mother almost wishes that bond wasn’t so strong, because she faces the prospect of an agonising bereavement if something happens to the daughter. But there is something about Big Data – the idea that you can excavate and anticipate people’s impulses and desires – that makes you wonder if maybe there isn’t a soul. That maybe we are just a batch of impulses. And that if we can work those out in a person, the uniqueness of that person might then disappear.
CA: Are you saying love is simply a myth we’ve been telling ourselves in order to give meaning and purpose to our own lives? And that AI will expose that love as a delusion? KI: I think that’s a question we might think about. Love might be like a pre-Enlightenment belief that survives into the post-Enlightenment era because we cling on to it.
But we might look at science and technology as representing forces that make it harder to do that.
NI: I think this is getting a little ahead of itself. I remember you saying, Dad, ages ago with Never Let Me Go, that you had stopped writing characters and started writing relationships because you found that relationships were the key to writing a novel. And it’s relationships, isn’t it, that matter? It’s not another person in an abstract, algorithmic sense. It’s the relationship between the two of you. If they are not selfconscious they are just a bundle of information. And you can’t have an evolving, changing relationship with that. People are still human. We need relationships.
KI: Yes, that’s the conclusion of Klara. Common Ground is based on a network of relationships, too. But I come from an older tradition that said novels are made up of plot and character so I have to make a conscious effort to refocus my interest on human relationships.
CA: Naomi, when you were a child was your father absent while he was writing?
NI: This is interesting to me: whether you can be a writer and a parent. I can barely look after a dog while I am writing! But as a child, I would just barge into my father’s study and say, “It’s game time,” and, paradoxically, he was much more around than other parents. I was never aware of that sort of absence. KI: You asked earlier about the influence I might have had on Naomi as a writer. But I have to say that I have been influenced a lot, not just by the fact we had a child, but by Naomi and her influences. You start to see things through her eyes and become open to different ways of telling stories, to different genres.
Part of the reason I was able to move into sci-fi in Never Let Me Go was because I had a young daughter who was incredibly enthusiastic about these things. Klara and the Sun is actually quite influenced by those illustrated hardback books for three-year-olds. In a way it’s my flirtation with that genre.
CA: So you never feared the pram in the hall?
KI: It was easy for me because early in my career I had financial success, which enabled me to do nothing but sit at home and write. As you can see from the fact I’ve only produced eight novels in 40 years, I don’t actually work very hard anyway!
‘When Naomi started to write, my wife and I neurotically looked for references to us’
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber, £20) is out on Tues. Common Ground by Naomi Ishiguro (Tinder Press, £16.99) is out on March 25