Bowen Yang had a long and significant connection to The Wedding Banquet before being cast in the 2025 remake.
“I first saw the movie in college, so well after it had come out. I was obviously familiar with Brokeback Mountain, but then it was in college that I kind of wanted to do my homework on [director Ang] Lee as a filmmaker,” Yang, 34, exclusively shared with Us Weekly at the film’s Los Angeles premiere. “And watching this was very, very resonant because I was also hiding a big part of my life from my parents as well.”
Lee, 70, directed the original film, which premiered in 1993 and followed Winston Chao’s Wai-Tung and his boyfriend, Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), as a happy gay couple in New York City whose lives are thrown into flux when Wai-Tung’s Taiwanese parents, unaware of his sexuality, ask him to marry a struggling artist hoping for a green card. The remake, directed and written by Andrew Ahn, stars Yang alongside Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran and Han Gi-Chan.
In the new iteration, Yang portrays Chris, an updated version of Lichtenstein’s Simon. He recalled the original film ending on an “uncertain note” when it came to Wai-Tung’s complicated coming-out journey with his family, but he said it also gave him “hope” for his own story as a gay man.
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“You’re not really sure if things are going to be OK or not. [His family hasn’t] fully accepted him as a gay man, but it still ends in a gesture of love,” Yang explained of the 1993 film’s ending. “They still embrace, and that gave me hope for the future, that I could have an honest life with my family. And so to check in with it now, as we release this version of it, is really beautiful and touching because that came to pass.”
Yang shared that he now has a “really beautiful relationship” with his parents about his queerness, and that “is the resonance that the original movie has that I hope people can contextualize with what an amazing journey it is.”
Ahn’s iteration, of course, has made some major updates since Lee’s 1993 story. The new film ups the queerness level with Gi-Chan as Min, who wants to stay in America with boyfriend Chris but is at risk of being sent home to Korea after getting fired from his job by his grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung). When Min’s grandmother comes to visit the States, he and upstairs neighbor Angela (Tran) pretend to be engaged in fear of her traditional views. Angela, meanwhile, is battling her own relationship woes with partner Lee (Gladstone), as the pair have been experiencing multiple pregnancy losses amid IVF.
While poignant themes are woven all throughout The Wedding Banquet — generational divide, women’s health and queer identity, to name a few — it’s also chock-full of hijinks and fun, both of which drew Gladstone in.
“I’m very genre-agnostic. It’s about if I see myself in the character and a lot of times if it’s something I can challenge myself,” the Oscar nominee, 38, told Us at the L.A. premiere. “With that being said, with The Wedding Banquet, anybody who knows me and loves me and has watched it says this is the most Lily role that I’ve taken yet. It feels the most like hanging out with me, watching Lee. And I agree. In a lot of ways this comedy, this world, this loving, hilarious story feels very close to some origin.”
Another draw for Gladstone was the opportunity to star opposite “household name” Yang, who reminds her mother of the unborn son she lost to a miscarriage before getting pregnant with Gladstone.
“It sounds silly. [And I was like], ‘God, Andrew, don’t tell Bowen this. It’s too heavy. Too much pressure.’ But my mom had lost a baby before she got pregnant with me that she knew was gonna be a boy,” Gladstone shared exclusively with Us. “His name was going to be August. So we grew up, I grew up with this knowledge of who this boy was, and if he were here … I think the overlap, the timing didn’t work out. So I just felt his presence growing up and my mom and I would kind of acknowledge it and talk about him, who he would’ve been, how he would’ve been, what his sense of humor was, what he would’ve been good at.”
Gladstone said that she and her mother were watching Saturday Night Live when a sketch with Yang came on the screen and Gladstone’s mom immediately felt connected to him. “She’s like, ‘That’s my son. There he is,’” Gladstone recalled. “So I wanted to give my mom that gift of having both of her kids, her earthly body child, and her star baby on onscreen together.”
As for Tran — who publicly came out as queer in November 2024 — the allure of The Wedding Banquet was simple.
“I was just really excited to tell a queer story with a bunch of queer folks,” she told Us. “And I think that the film does such a good job of illuminating such a plethora of different queer experiences. That was the thing that I was really excited about.”
The Wedding Banquet is in theaters now.
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