The Korean-American director Andrew Ahn, 39, broke through in 2016 with his debut feature Spa Night, a slow, sexy, beautifully observed film about the coming of age—and sexual awakening—of a closeted Korean-American teenager who works at an all-male spa in L.A.’s Koreatown. The film won the John Cassavetes Award at the 2017 Independent Spirit Awards—but even then, Ahn’s path forward seemed murky.
“I didn’t think that I could make a film career of queer and Asian work,” Ahn says. “I thought I’d have to make a white-person movie. I think about [the director] Justin Lin—he made Better Luck Tomorrow [a hit 2002 indie featuring an all-Asian cast], and then he made that movie Annapolis with James Franco. I thought that’s what I’d have to do to build my career.”
Instead, Ahn doubled down. For Driveways, his follow-up, Ahn cast Asian actors in lead roles that had been written as white, giving future Oscar nominee Hong Chau one of her best pre-The Whale showcases. And in 2022, he showed that he could do lighter fare, with the horny, tenderhearted rom-com Fire Island, a streaming hit on Hulu that managed to tell a story set in the Pines, the notoriously white gay community on Fire Island, and center it on gay Asian men, played by Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang.
Now, Ahn is in town to promote another rom-com, once again starring Yang and once again centering the queer Asian-American experience.
His new film The Wedding Banquet is a remake of the Oscar-nominated 1993 Ang Lee classic, starring Yang and Lily Gladstone. While it follows many of the same beats as the Lee original, Ahn’s Wedding Banquet is a comedy of errors about a lesbian couple who strike a deal with their gay friends, to exchange a visa marriage for IVF money. It will also be the first of Ahn’s films to get a proper theatrical release—a remarkable achievement for a rom-com about queer Asian characters, even one that features a recent Oscar nominee (Gladstone, of Killers of the Flower Moon) and a standout from one of last year’s biggest blockbusters (Yang, from Wicked.)
“I feel like I had to assemble this Asian Avengers cast in order to make it,” Ahn says.
Along with Yang and Gladstone, the film features Kelly Marie Tran, the Vietnamese-American actress who played Rose Tico in two recent Star Wars movies, Han Gi-chan, a BL star in South Korea, Youn Yuh-jung, an Oscar winner for her role as the grandmother in Minari, and the legendary Joan Chen, a revered veteran who’s appeared in classics like The Last Emperor and Twin Peaks and is in the middle of another resurgence, thanks to last year’s Dìdi.
Twenty years ago, Alice Wu’s Saving Face, an indie rom-com about a lesbian Chinese-American surgeon, her pregnant mother—played by Chen—and her dancer girlfriend, opened in limited release in US theaters after a successful festival run in the Toronto International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival. Saving Face was a modest success but later became a touchpoint for Asian-American directors like The Farewell director Lulu Wang (“There was Ang Lee, there was Alice,” Wang told the New York Times) and Ahn. But in Saving Face’s aftermath, for almost two decades, no queer Asian rom-com received a major theatrical release in America, relegated mostly to streaming or a handful of theaters.