Rose tico actress update#

“It reinforced within me rules that were written before I was born, rules that made my parents deem it necessary to abandon their real names and adopt American ones - Tony and Kay - so it was easier for others to pronounce,” Tran writes, “a literal erasure of culture that still has me aching to the core.” Throughout her essay, Tran recalls little moments of seemingly harmless social interactions that harshly reminded her that, simply because of her ethnicity, she is the “other.” “Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.” “It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them,” begins Tran’s essay in the Times. 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' (2017) Lucasfilm A known Facebook page with the actual name “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and Its Fanboys,” a group that expressed declarations to “Bring back the Straight White Male Hero” to Star Wars, claimed responsibility for harassing Tran. While Johnson and others dealt with the usual crop of trolls, Tran uniquely dealt with racism and sexism from (mostly) white male fans. On Wookiepedia, a fan-run Star Wars encyclopedia, a user edited Rose Tico’s entry with racial slurs. They disapproved of Tran’s character, Rose Tico, but the vitriol was focused on mocking her weight and race. While nearly all actors and entertainers adopt “normal” names - Natalie Portman’s real name is Neta-Lee Hershlag, and Fred Astaire was actually Frederick Austerlitz - there’s an extra layer for Tran, a Vietnamese-American woman who was the target of bigoted harassment over her appearance in The Last Jedi.Įarlier this year, Tran was chased off social media by fans of Disney’s Star Wars franchise who so strongly disliked her appearance in the film that they bombarded the social profiles of the film’s actors and its director, Rian Johnson. Simply put, it’s an act of defiance for a person of color to go by their “unpronounceable” name instead of an adopted Anglo name - aka “normal” names - as Tran explains in her essay. The significance of Tran revealing, and possibly going by, her Vietnamese name cannot be overstated. I am the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair. “I am the first woman of color to have a leading role in a Star Wars movie. “You might know me as Kelly,” reads the closing lines of her Times essay.

Rose tico actress update#

We have reached out to Tran’s representatives to confirm if she is indeed changing her stage name, and we’ll update when we hear back. In an emotional New York Times essay about her life as a woman of color, Kelly Marie Tran ends her piece by revealing her real Vietnamese name: Loan, pronounced “Lu-awn.” I think Rey has to keep asking herself who she is and keep declaring who she is in the course of this movie, and that changes.After months away from social media after being attacked by Star Wars fans, Last Jedi star Kelly Marie Tran has seemingly decided to start going by her birth name. And that immediately told you who Rey was back in Episode 7 … Who is Rey, is a question that is much more than a factual one, it’s a character question. “She sees BB-8, who’s an underdog, a weak droid, being exploited by someone, and without missing a beat, she stands up for him. That’s not contradicted by what you learn in this film, but that she’s the descendant of someone who represents the opposite of all that the Skywalkers represent … Other than scavenging, the first thing that we see Rey do in the trilogy is perform an act of kindness and compassion for BB-8,” Terrio said. In a way, the worst possible news for the Rey of Episode 8 is that she is just a child of junk traders, which is true. always felt that she should get the worst possible news. “When Rey was wondering what her place in all this was - and she articulated that in Episode 8 - but she wondered it in Episode 7, too. always had an idea in his head of where he wanted us to emotionally leave the trilogy, and I think he wanted Rey to have to contend with the very worst things about herself that we could imagine,” he said. “I don’t know that I’m supposed to get into the specifics of what story points were already in place, but what I can say is that J.J.