‘The Wedding Banquet’ Star Lily Gladstone Changed Her Character Name to Honor Indigenous People — and Nodded to Ang Lee in the Process

Don’t call it a remake, it’s a reimagining. In the case of Andrew Ahn’s take on Ang Lee’s 1993 romantic comedy “The Wedding Banquet,” that couldn’t be more true. For the “Driveways” filmmaker’s latest film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival before its upcoming spring release, reimagining, freshening up, and contemporizing the story of a young gay Taiwanese immigrant who lies to his parents about his romantic status and ends up falling into a green card marriage to a woman, was top of mind.

Ahn’s take on the film has some canny tweaks: Our star (Han Gi-chan) and his character are now Korean, while his eventual fake wife Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) is already in her own same-sex relationship with Lee (Lily Gladstone). There are plenty more updates to the story (bonus Bowen Yang! Joan Chen, who was almost cast in Lee’s version! Youn Yuh-jung as a savvy grandmother!), but the personal touches the cast and crew brought to it seem particularly special.

When Ahn, alongside Gladstone, Gi-chan, Tran, Yang, Chen, and Youn, joined IndieWire at our Sundance studio presented by Dropbox, the group was all too happy to talk about some of those details. And one in particular really stuck out, for both its thoughtfulness and serendipitous nature.

“I think what’s really helpful to me is that I’ve had such wonderful collaborators who have kind of taken some of the authorship away from me, which I’m very happy about,” Ahn said. “The process has been so organic. … [like] Lily changing the name of the character to ‘Lee.'”

The original character name? Liz. “There was a part of me that’s like, I don’t really want to play a lesbian named Liz,” Gladstone said to big laughs from Ahn and her cast. “It’s a bit on the nose.”

Instead, Gladstone said, she went for Lee, which has some deep roots to it. “I decided that, because it takes place in Seattle, [and] there is a significantly underrepresented tribal entity fighting for federal recognition, that is Chief Seattle’s [Si’ahl’s] nation, Duwamish,” the actress said. “Aren’t currently federally recognized as a tribe, they’ve been trying to be … for some time. So, art is transcendence, it’s how we shape societies, it was important for me to make my character Duwamish. A Duwamish person on Duwamish land has not really been seen in cinema before.”

Oscar nominee Gladstone has long used her platform to elevate and illuminate indigenous people in the United States and beyond, but she (and the rest of the cast) were delighted to find an extra dimension to her already-thoughtful change, one that nodded back to the film’s own origins.

“A really famous figure in Duwamish culture, Chief Seattle’s [Si’ahl’s] daughter, was Princess Angeline,” Gladstone said. “So, I said, ‘I would like my character to be named after Angeline,’ but since [Kelly Marie Tran’s character is] ‘Angela,’ funny little backstory, it’s like, ‘Well, I just go by Lee.’ And, as we were filming, we were like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re Ang Lee.‘”

“The Wedding Banquet” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Bleecker Street will release it in theaters on Friday, April 18.

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