Lily Gladstone says friends thought she’d be on ‘SNL’

Lily Gladstone might not be famous for her comedy chops, but to those closest to her, she was always destined to make people laugh.

While best known for her dramatic roles in films like Killers of the Flower Moon, she now gets the chance to show off her humor in Andrew Ahn’s remake of the 1993 cult classic comedy The Wedding Banquet.

“I’ve loved doing this since I was a little kid,” Gladstone tells Entertainment Weekly of the comedy genre in a joint interview with her costars, Kelly Marie Tran, Bowen Yang, and Han Gi-chan. “Nobody from my community back home or in my family is surprised that I’m an actress. There are plenty of people surprised that I became a dramatic actress.”

She adds, “When I was doing my first plays, people would come up to my mom and dad and be like, ‘We’re going to see her on Saturday Night Live someday,’ or, ‘She’s going to be like The Nanny, have some kind of sitcom.’

Gladstone says it was “always the assumption” that she’d end up in comedy: “Just being a goofy, performative kid that put on lots of different characters and really enjoyed making people laugh, it took a lot of folks, myself included, by surprise that I became such a dramatic actor.”

Gladstone gets back to her comedy roots in The Wedding Banquet as Lee, whose hopes of starting a family with her partner Angela (played by Tran) are derailed by a series of unsuccessful and costly IVF treatments. Meanwhile, their best friends and next-door neighbors, Min (Han) and his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chris (Yang), are having problems of their own.

Min, a Korean national, wants to propose to Chris, but his U.S. visa is expiring. So, the friends come up with a plan to solve both problems: Min and Angela will get married to help him secure a green card, and, in exchange, he’ll pay for Lee’s next round of IVF. (His family back home in Korea, it turns out, is loaded.) Hijinks ensue when Min’s formidable grandmother, played by Yuh-jung Youn, announces her plans to travel to the States to throw her grandson — who has not come out to his family — a grand wedding banquet.

The script, written by Ahn and the original film’s co-writer James Schamus, resonated with Gladstone due to the “love and levity fused into these very real, grounded situations.” She praises Ahn for cultivating an inclusive and creative environment on set. “He built a very tight ship, and it gave us room to express ourselves and be ourselves,” she says. “There was no reason other than my casting for Lee to be Indigenous, and having a moment to speak about her specific Indigeneity is a very loaded thing, but it added a lot of depth to Lee for me.”

Gladstone adds, “The more representation we have, the more of a reflection of society. Artists like Andrew, they’re telling real stories that are representing a huge swath of our population that’s been unrepresented. It just makes for better movies in the long run. Humanity is diverse, and our stories need to reflect that.”

As for those who assumed she’d be on Saturday Night Live one day, she does have an inside person who could help make that happen. “Trust me, I’ve been campaigning,” quips Yang, who became SNL‘s first Chinese-American cast member when he joined as a key player in 2019.

The Wedding Banquet hits theaters on April 18.