Gemma Chan is perched on a chair in her dimly lit hotel room, barefoot, hair pulled back into a bun that didn’t quite catch the front pieces. She is telling me that all she wants, after the biggest year yet in her career, is to get a dog. A rescue, probably. For the first time all night, she is just Gemma.
Moments earlier, she was holding court in a voluminous, rose-colored couture gown. It was like a scene in a movie: two seamstresses flitting about her, making sure that her crinoline petticoat is fluffed just so, that the train grazes the floor perfectly, and that the ruffle on the gown’s bodice flounces at just the right height, all done under the direction of designer Jason Wu. With newfound fame comes newfound scrutiny. The grosgrain ribbon she deftly lobbied to be sewn on at the waist would be noted in the press a week later.
And yet even after the fitting, in a comfy gray sweater and cropped jeans, she still exudes an otherworldly quality. That’s partly due to her measured, soft, and properly British way of speaking and partly due to her looks. Her face is symmetrical to a degree that seems statistically improbable, complete with high cheekbones, bright eyes, and full lips, which may explain why she’s often cast in extraordinary roles: the self-sacrificing android Mia in the British TV series
Humans, Nick Young’s flawless but troubled cousin Astrid in
Crazy Rich Asians, and most recently, the sharp-shooting space sniper Minn-Erva in
Captain Marvel. “I’m not allowed to talk about it very much,” Chan says, “but she’s part of an elite special-forces team that Brie Larson’s character is part of, and Jude Law is our commander. She’s a sniper, and she’s very, very good at her job.”
Speaking of which, Chan almost had another career entirely. She graduated from Oxford University in 2004 with a law degree and was offered a job with a leading law firm in London but turned it down. Instead, she enrolled at the prestigious Drama Centre in London. Prestigious or not, Chan has publicly confirmed that her parents, both hardworking Chinese immigrants who earned advanced degrees in Scotland against tremendous odds (in her father’s case, surviving two years of homelessness and putting his five siblings through school), thought the move to drama was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.
Chan’s laundry list of accomplishments (she was also a competitive swimmer and almost became a professional violinist) strongly suggests exacting, overachiever tendencies. But it’s not so simple. “I was away on an orchestra trip in Italy, and I went missing for a night. They freaked out, thinking I’d gotten lost, but I was in a boys’ room smoking and drinking,” Chan says. “I behaved pretty badly.” She was 12 years old. I tell her about my first drinking experience, in my early teens, drinking vodka straight. “Oh, my God. Did you pass out?” she asks. I did not. I can really hold my liquor. A smile flashes across her face. “I can really hold my liquor as well.”
Chan recounts another story of her younger, schoolgirl self, her jaw shut tight, soldiering home in blood-stained socks without shedding a single tear after falling from her scooter. It strikes me as extremely fitting when I learn that one of her many early jobs — stocking shelves in the U.K. drugstore chain Boots, working at a mall perfume counter — was as a lifeguard. She assures me it was not glamorous, joking that it “basically involved cleaning people’s pubes from the shower drain.” She does not tell me that she prevented a little girl from drowning until I offer that I was also a lifeguard but never attempted a rescue. When I suggest that she saved a life, she looks visibly uncomfortable and explains: “I saw a girl in trouble. She must have been three or four. But she was within reach, so I just scooped her out. It wasn’t anything major.”
Then there was the time she saw a man on the sidewalk near a train station get stabbed in the neck. It was rush hour, and she was on her way to see a play. “No one else seemed to notice. People were kind of stepping around him. I went to go help the guy. I turned him over, and then I looked up and just locked eyes with his attacker,” Chan says. “In that moment I thought, This is it. He’s going to come back and stab me, and I probably won’t be able to outrun him.” Luckily, a train pulled into the station, a stream of people exited, and the attacker disappeared into the crowd. Chan asked a passerby to call for medical help. Thinking quickly, she urged another to take a photo of the attacker as he made his getaway. The victim died before the ambulance arrived, but she was able to identify the attacker and later served as a witness in the trial. “I still replay it in my mind. Should I have stuck my fingers in the guy’s neck and tried to, like, hold [a vein]?” she says. “I don’t know.”
Clearly, Chan is not timid in a crisis. But she insists that she is “actually quite shy” and “socially awkward” and that she works hard to mask it. I am surprised that this is one of the few things she tells me outright about her personality, particularly when I think back to our first interaction. She playfully peered over the top of the railing next to the booth where I was sitting, called my name, smiled brightly when I confirmed it was me, and bounded up the stairs to our booth.
Within five minutes, she had established that my dress and her Breton-stripe shirt were from the same store (an offshoot of the fashion brand H&M called "& Other Stories"), asked about my day, found out where I was from, and ordered us olives to munch on while we sipped orange juice (her, trying to detox from a battery of awards-season after-parties) and wine (me, trying to summon the courage to ask personal questions) and waited for our entrées (both, pasta). She stops midconversation, conspiratorially, and enlists me to people-watch with her. (She thinks she may recognize someone in the booth closest to us.)
So it’s for good reason that I remain dubious about her shyness claim until she puts a finer point on it: “In a new social situation, I’d much rather sit back and let other people talk first,” Chan says. “I prefer to listen and, I suppose, get the measure of people before I necessarily give them all of me.” She does let me do most of the talking at first and, during our conversation, lets out a torrent of thoughts on a topic before stopping short, as if remembering that I am both a stranger and a reporter, becoming more reserved until a familiar or provocative thought warms her up again. She may think of herself as shy, but she comes across as thoughtful. And acutely self-aware. In all fairness, she has to be.
Due to the dearth of Asian actresses with significant fame, Chan has become a de facto standard-bearer for Asian representation in film and TV. I assumed that she would be tired of talking about it after doing so in nearly every interview during her
Crazy Rich Asians press tour and countless others. She is not. She is fully Chinese by heritage, but Chan describes her racial identity as “compound. I feel British, and European, and English, and Chinese, and Asian.” She brings up the Internet trolls who took issue with her playing Queen Elizabeth’s confidante, Bess of Hardwick, in the period piece
Mary Queen of Scots because she isn’t white.
“Why are actors of color, who have fewer opportunities anyway, only allowed to play their own race? And sometimes they’re not even allowed to play their own race,” Chan says. “In the past, the role would be given to a white actor who would tape up their eyes and do the role in yellowface. John Wayne played Genghis Khan. If John Wayne can play Genghis Khan, I can play Bess of Hardwick.”
“I feel like
Hamilton opened minds a lot. We have a black man playing George Washington. They describe it as ‘America then, told by America now.’ And I think our art should reflect life now,” Chan says. And life then, too. Last year, Chan worked on a documentary about the Chinese Labour Corps. “I studied the First World War three times at school. And I never heard that there were 140,000 Chinese in the Allied effort,” she says. “We would not have won the war without them.”
I never heard about those Chinese laborers, either. In large part, it’s because of the images that remain. Chan tells me about a mural made to commemorate that war. It was massive, she says. There was a whole section dedicated to the Chinese, but it was painted over when the Americans joined the war effort. “They left one kneeling Chinese figure, which you can still see,” she says. “If people understood that, my parents [might not] have been told, ‘Go home, go back to where you came from’ multiple times. If we portray a pure white past, people start to believe that’s how it was, and that’s not how it was.”
Chan playing Bess of Hardwick is a step toward visibility. Chan playing Minn-Erva is, too (the Marvel character is blue and has dark hair, but the alien’s race in the comics is ambiguous). Chan’s newfound media prominence gives her a platform, and she’s embracing it. Wu is just one of several Asian designers whose clothes Chan has worn in recent red-carpet appearances. After seeing photos of a New York City screening of
Crazy Rich Asians hosted by Prabal Gurung and other prominent Asian-Americans in fashion, and attended by Asian designers, editors, and makeup artists, Chan committed to wearing Asian designers (Prabal Gurung, Kenzo, Altuzarra, Adeam) for the majority of that press tour. “I was just so moved,” she says.
Chan repeatedly underscores that it’s not just about Asian representation. She mentions Spike Lee’s
BlacKkKlansmanand Ryan Coogler’s
Black Panther as important for their nearly all-black casts.
Captain Marvel features the first stand-alone woman title character in the Marvel franchise. It’s also the first Marvel movie directed by a woman. Chan also celebrates “what Prabal Gurung’s been doing — putting models on the runway who are plus-size, who are transgender,” she says. “I love opening up a magazine and seeing a
whole mixture of body types, gray hair, dark skin, wrinkles — we’re saying that we find these things beautiful.”
Chan could talk about this all night. We nearly do. And don’t get her started on U.K. politics (I do anyway) — it’s such a mess, she tells me. “My issue with politicians like David Cameron, of the Conservative Party, whose fault all of this Brexit stuff is — he went from Eton to Oxford, then I think he worked for a time in communications before going straight into Parliament. He’s lived such a privileged life without any real interaction with anyone who’s having to live under his government’s policy. And I think that distance, that disconnect, is so damaging,” Chan says. “I’m so grateful for my work. But sometimes it feels almost absurd to be going onto a set to play kind of make-believe. There are so many things that demand our attention.”
Like Time’s Up — Chan is involved with the Justice and Equality Fund, the U.K. equivalent of the movement’s Legal Defense Fund. “You have to attack [the problem] on a regulatory level while also trying to change the culture,” she says. “This is all going to take time.” She also partnered with fellow British actress Ruth Wilson and the British Film Institute to do educational workshops with more than 400 drama-school students on how to protect yourself from compromising audition situations, understand nudity clauses, and recognize other abuses of power. “What’s going to be expected of you if you have to do a sex scene? What if you get asked to do something you’re not comfortable with? How can you say no?” Chan says. “These are things they don’t teach you in drama school.”
Between aiming to shift industry norms and taking on superhuman roles, what could be next on Chan’s list of things to do? Being vulnerable, it turns out. In an as-yet-untitled Dominic Savage drama coming out later this year, she’s playing an ordinary (OK, ridiculously beautiful) woman “who is feeling very under pressure to start a family,” Chan says. “Everyone she knows is having babies, settling down, becoming a mother, and, um, she feels like she’s an anomaly for not being sure whether she wants that.”
She doesn’t share details about her own relationship, but it’s been widely reported that Chan is dating actor Dominic Cooper after splitting from longtime beau Jack Whitehall more than a year ago. She and Cooper made their first public appearance together at the British Fashion Awards in December. Something about Chan’s tone of voice, the way she talks about this role, makes it feel a little nearer than fiction. But I don’t have to ask. “It’s drawing on a lot of me in it,” Chan admits. “It’s exciting and terrifying in equal measure.”
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