Kelly Marie Tran Opens Up About Racist & Misogynist Bullying She Faced After 'Star Wars'

Kelly Marie Tran isn’t holding back.

The 32-year-old actress is getting candid about the bullying she faced after being cast in 2017′s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which resulted in criticism that caused her to eventually delete social media and withdraw from public life, which she discussed in an essay for the New York Times.

She is now speaking out about the experience in conversation with THR, explaining that the experience felt like she “fell in love very publicly and then very publicly had an embarrassingly horrible breakup.”

“If someone doesn’t understand me or my experience, it shouldn’t be my place to have to internalize their misogyny or racism or all of the above,” she said of what she learned in therapy after the harassment.

“Maybe they just don’t have the imagination to understand that there are different types of people living in the world.”

“What’s interesting to me about working in this industry is that certain things become so public, even if you don’t really mean them to be, [like] the succession of events in which I left the internet for my own sanity…it was basically me being like, ‘Oh, this isn’t good for my mental health. I’m obviously going to leave this.’”

“I left. I said no to a lot of things. It felt like I was just hearing the voice of my agents and my publicity team and all of these people telling me what to say and what to do and how to feel. And I realized, I didn’t know how I felt anymore. And I didn’t remember why I was in this in the first place,” she said.

“Any time that happens, I have to close up shop and go away for a while and really interact in the real world — read books and journal and go on hikes and look at a tree and remind myself that there was a fire that burned inside of me before Star Wars, before any of this. And I needed to find that again.”

She also explained how she recorded her Raya dialogue amid the pandemic.