Another day, another slay for the cast and crew of Bleecker Street’s newest queer romantic comedy film The Wedding Banquet!
A reimagining of the classic 1993 film by Brokeback Mountain legend Ang Lee from Fire Island and Spa Night’s Andrew Ahn, this modern tale of found family stars Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang, Star Wars’ Kelly Marie Tran, Oscar-nominated Killers of the Flower Moon actress Lily Gladstone, and Where Your Eyes Linger’s Han Gi-chan as a co-dependent group of Seattle friends, lovers, and housemates as they navigate an interesting time in their lives that includes faking a traditional (and straight!) Korean wedding ceremony and trying to conceive a child.
Hilarity aside, The Wedding Banquet is a unique and fresh take on the found family story, giving viewers — especially queer Asians — the type of representation they have been craving in media for years.
To celebrate the release of this queer, Asian masterpiece of a film, Bleecker Street and Tremendous Communications hosted a special drag brunch event at Chifa in Los Angeles, and Gold Envelope was there to witness all the fun!
On the red carpet, we spoke to stars Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran, as well as director/co-writer Andrew Ahn, about what found family means to them, which new gayborhood Ahn should showcase in his next project, their favorite wedding food, and more!
“We wanted to create what the home felt like, a safe space,” Gladstone told Gold Envelope when asked about crafting the dynamic between the film’s four leads. “My character, her job is creating spaces for people that are marginalized, squeezed out of their homes. You don’t learn a lot about what she’s doing in the office, but the back story I did is searching for housing and a recommendation for a shelter for trans youth that was kicked out of their home. And more than anybody, you want Lee to be a mom. You want to see this family raise children and raise a community together. So we just wanted everything in the home, everything about our dynamic, to be very assuring, very accepting, very encouraging of each other, and that’s what working together felt like. It’s why the dynamic was so immediate and effortless. Is because somebody would make a choice, and the rest of us would just support it and applaud it and advance it and just it was. It was really just pretty effortless.”
“It was really easy,” Tran adds when asked about working with her three co-leads. “Bowen and Lily and Gi-chan and everyone involved was just so open and generous as actors, but also as people. We were able to become friends really, really quickly, and that says a lot about the kinds of people that they are. They just made the environment so comfortable, so we’re really lucky.”
Watch Gold Envelope’s red-carpet interviews with The Wedding Banquet stars in the video below!
The Wedding Banquet is now playing in theaters!
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