In 1993, director Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility, Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi) had his first big breakthrough with The Wedding Banquet, a rom-com about a marriage of convenience between a partially closeted Taiwanese immigrant and his green-card-seeking female tenant. Now, more than 30 years later, Lee’s queer comedy of errors has been artfully reimagined by Fire Island helmer Andrew Ahn, who translated the pre-marriage-equality story into a timely charmer led by Lily Gladstone, Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran, and Han Gi-chan.
Ahn’s take on The Wedding Banquet follows a close-knit group of cohabiting Seattlites—couples Lee (Gladstone) and Angela (Tran) and Chris (Yang) and Min (Han)—who hatch a plan for a mutually beneficial sham marriage. In exchange for helping Min, the heir to a Korean fashion conglomerate, stay in the country while Chris works through his commitment issues, Angela, the bride-to-be, and her partner, Lee, will get funding for another round of IVF. But things get complicated when Min’s grandmother (Youn Yuh-Jung) arrives from Korea to orchestrate the wedding.
The result is a film that explores the bounds of chosen family with humor and heart, starring a cast that formed a fortuitous kinship of their own. “I had my first in-person meeting with Andrew the morning after the Golden Globes,” Gladstone tells Vogue. “And I told him, ‘I love the script. I love your other films. But honestly I think the biggest sign for me to take this is that it’s Bowen playing Chris.”
Gladstone—who earned a historic best-actress win for her role in Killers of the Flower Moon at the Globes last year—says that she’d felt a kind of spiritual connection to her costar well before agreeing to do the film. The Indigenous actor, who grew up on the Montana reservation of the Blackfeet Nation, knew as a kid that her mother had miscarried only a few months before becoming pregnant with Gladstone. After spending much of her childhood imagining what her brother, named August, would have been like, she was watching Saturday Night Live with her mom when, suddenly, they saw him. “Bowen had joined the cast, and my mom says, like, ‘That’s him!’” Gladstone recalls. “‘That’s who he would have been.’”
Fast-forward to 2024, and Gladstone—known for her turns as strong, stoic women in projects like Fancy Dance and Under the Bridge, as well as Killers of the Flower Moon—was approached by Ahn about playing Lee in The Wedding Banquet. Despite her reservations, which included tackling a comedy and honoring her character’s struggle with IVF, she jumped at the chance to star opposite Yang, who had already signed on to play Angela’s codependent best friend, Chris.
“I had my feelers out anyway for something more lighthearted,” Gladstone says. “Reading this, there was romance and comedy, but it was so grounded in such beautiful, important dynamics and situations.” And besides, she says, “I was like, I need to give my mom the gift of doing a film with Bowen Yang. I need her to see her daughter and her son onscreen together.” (Gladstone refers to Yang as her “star brother.”)
If the universe reuniting her with a long-lost brother on set seems a little far-fetched, Gladstone says that every meaningful film she’s made has had “little supernatural signs or touches to them.”
“I feel like some films really have their own animism, and those films—the ones that need to get made, that have their own life—choose when they bring people together,” she says. “Those are the kind of films where you get perfect weather on a day that was forecast to be exactly the opposite. There’s always these little signs.”
Yang, for his part, wasn’t expecting to form a cosmic connection when he agreed to collaborate with Ahn again, after starring in his 2022 rom-com Fire Island. But the comedian says he’s still “floored” by Gladstone’s story and the idea of the forces that brought them together. “It’s just one of the most incredible things I’ve ever heard about myself,” Yang says, turning toward his costar. “It is one of those things where there’s some sort of—what did you say it was? ‘Metaphysical will’?”
Yet while their bond felt uniquely fated, Gladstone and Yang say they weren’t the only cast members who forged a connection while making The Wedding Banquet. From the actors’ collective sense of protectiveness over Han, who was taking on his first English-language role, to the maternal warmth that emanated from Youn (Minari) and Joan Chen (The Last Emperor), who plays Angela’s overeager mom, all manner of familial connections seemed to emerge during filming.
This was, in a way, exactly as Ahn intended: The filmmaker chose not to do chemistry reads or rehearsals with his actors, trusting his hunch that they would all connect. He also encouraged them to create substantial backstories for their characters and to let those histories shape their onscreen relationships. “When we all dove into the scenes, there was just this immediate delight—and recognition—seeing what was coming out of each actor,” says Gladstone, who proposed making Lee a member of the Seattle-based Duwamish tribe to inform her focus on legacy.
The film’s centering of found family was also compelling—and warmly familiar. “Where I come from, it’s built in that you have aunties and uncles around and that you embrace them as other parents,” Gladstone says. “There’s not a word in our languages, traditionally, for ‘auntie’—it’s ‘little mother.’ One thing I love about this film is that it acknowledges that [raising a family] is impossible to do without friends, without community.”
Her costar—himself a found sibling of sorts—agrees. “This movie is about these four people who really need each other,” Yang says. “They know each other so well and, as Gi-chan puts it, love each other too hard. That’s the source of their problems. It’s not too big of a leap to go, ‘We’re doing this—nurturing a human life—together.’ The only circumstances that I would rear a child in would be if I had help in my friends. That would be the only way you could talk me into it.”