[10/100] pictures of → Kelly Marie Tran
Trần Loan, known professionally as Kelly Marie Tran, is a Vietnamese-American actor best known for her role as Rose Tico in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy (beginning with Episode VIII: The Last Jedi) and associated media, including the Star Wars: Forces of Destiny cartoon series. Although cast in Star Wars in 2015, Kelly’s career began in 2011 with the Los Angeles improv troupes Upright Citizens Brigade and The Second City. Since TLJ, Kelly received critical and audience acclaim for her role of Jules in Sorry For Your Loss, in which she is praised for “tapping into her characters’ intrinsic empathy.”
However, also since TLJ, Kelly Marie Tran has borne the brunt of audience hatred for the film as the intersection of anti-Asian racism and misogyny collided in both her once effervescent online personality and the irresponsibly-underwritten role of Rose Tico. Of this targeted campaign of harassment, I’ll defer to KMT’s own words:
“I had been brainwashed into believing that my existence was limited to the boundaries of another person’s approval. I had been tricked into thinking that my body was not my own, that I was beautiful only if someone else believed it, regardless of my own opinion. I had been told and retold this by everyone: by the media, by Hollywood, by companies that profited from my insecurities, manipulating me so that I would buy their clothes, their makeup, their shoes, in order to fill a void that was perpetuated by them in the first place.
Yes, I have been lied to. We all have.
And it was in this realization that I felt a different shame — not a shame for who I was, but a shame for the world I grew up in. And a shame for how that world treats anyone who is different.I am not the first person to have grown up this way. This is what it is to grow up as a person of color in a white-dominated world. This is what it is to be a woman in a society that has taught its daughters that we are worthy of love only if we are deemed attractive by its sons. This is the world I grew up in, but not the world I want to leave behind.
[…T]hese are the thoughts that run through my head every time I pick up a script or a screenplay or a book. I know the opportunity given to me is rare. I know that I now belong to a small group of privileged people who get to tell stories for a living, stories that are heard and seen and digested by a world that for so long has tasted only one thing. I know how important that is. And I am not giving up.
You might know me as Kelly.
I am the first woman of color to have a leading role in a “Star Wars” movie.
I am the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair.
My real name is Loan. And I am just getting started.“











