Kelly Marie Tran

Kelly Marie Tran (born Loan Tran, January 17, 1989) is an American actress.

Kelly Marie Tran was born on January 17, 1989, in San Diego, California.

Her parents were refugees from Vietnam who fled the country following the Vietnam War.

As a child, her father was homeless and grew up on the streets of Vietnam.

After moving to the United States, her father worked at Burger King to support the family, and her mother worked at a funeral home.

Tran attended Westview High School in San Diego and worked at a yogurt shop to earn money for head shots.

Tran then graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a Bachelor of Arts in communications.

Tran's early credits consisted of primarily CollegeHumor videos and small TV roles.

She began acting in 2011, with most of her roles being in short film and television.

She landed a commercial agent in 2011, who got Tran to take improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade.

At The Second City, Tran is part of the all-female, Asian-American improv group, Number One Son.

In 2013, she starred in the web series Ladies Like Us.

In 2015, Tran was working as an assistant at a creative recruiting firm in Century City.

In 2015, Tran was cast as Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Rose Tico is a rebel mechanic who joins up with main character Finn after the sacrifice of her oldest sister, Paige Tico (Veronica Ngo), a gunner trained by Resistance commander Poe Dameron.

When she went to shoot her scenes in England in early 2016, she was required to keep her role secret, so she told her family she was making an independent film in Canada.

The Last Jedi made Tran the first Asian-American woman to have a major role in a Star Wars film.

She came to global prominence for her role as Rose Tico in the Star Wars sequel trilogy films The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019).

She also voiced Princess Raya in the Disney film Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) and Dawn Betterman in the DreamWorks Animation film The Croods: A New Age (2020).

In 2017, she also became the first woman of Asian descent to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair when she appeared on the cover of the summer 2017 issue with actor John Boyega (who played Finn) and Oscar Isaac (who played X-wing fighter pilot Poe Dameron).

Tran plays the lead role of Kaitlin Le in Radiotopia's mystery thriller podcast Passenger List.

She was a series regular on the Facebook Watch series Sorry for Your Loss.

Tran voiced Raya in the Walt Disney Animation Studios production Raya and the Last Dragon, replacing Cassie Steele.

Tran was set to voice Val Little in the Disney+ series Monsters at Work, but was replaced by Mindy Kaling.

She has also been cast as Dawn in the film The Croods: A New Age, replacing Kat Dennings.

Tran is an executive producer on Jeremy Workman's 2021 documentary Lily Topples the World, which follows 21-year-old domino toppling artist Lily Hevesh.

The documentary premiered to critical acclaim at the 2021 South by Southwest Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary.

Tran is also an executive producer of the spoken-word poetry ensemble film Summertime, marking her second collaboration with Raya and the Last Dragon director Carlos López Estrada.

Tran and Estrada announced that they were establishing a new production company called Antigravity Academy in November 2022, intending to help produce entertainment from and about people from historically excluded communities.

Tran will next star in Tayarisha Poe's second feature film, The Young Wife, alongside Kiersey Clemons, and in Me, Myself & The Void.

She is also currently developing a biopic about civil rights activist and her close friend Amanda Nguyen.

After the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi in December 2017, Tran became the subject of racist and sexist attacks over the Internet, including insults about her ethnicity and size.

She was the target of racist trolling on Twitter; in one example, Internet personality Paul Ray Ramsey mocked her size.

Her character Rose Tico's entry on Wookieepedia, an online encyclopedia about the Star Wars universe, was edited by internet trolls to include racist and vulgar comments, which drew national media attention.

Fandom, the wiki hosting service that operated the domain, removed the offensive edits, protected the page, and publicly condemned the vandalism.

After months of online harassment, Tran deleted all of her Instagram posts in June 2018, and replaced the account bio with, "Afraid, but doing it anyway."

She also pursued therapy following the harassment.

Subsequently, several cast and crew members of The Last Jedi condemned the attacks and spoke out in defense of Tran, including writer-director Rian Johnson and actors John Boyega, Domhnall Gleeson, and Mark Hamill, who posted a picture of himself with Tran and wrote the caption, "What's not to love? #GetALifeNerds".

Johnson branded the attackers as "manbabies", and said they represent a "few unhealthy people" and not the "vast majority" of Star Wars fans.

Other celebrities voiced support for Tran as well, including Stephen Colbert, Josh Gad, Kumail Nanjiani, Gabrielle Union, Elijah Wood, and Edgar Wright.