When Joan Chen was in her early 20s she met with the director Ang Lee about starring in his 1993 film “The Wedding Banquet,” a New York-set rom-com about a Taiwanese American in a relationship with another man who marries a woman in need of a green card. Chen was a star in China but had recently moved to Los Angeles, and was intrigued.

在20岁出头的时候，陈冲与导演李安见了面，商谈出演后者1993年的电影《喜宴》，那是一部以纽约为背景的浪漫喜剧，讲述了一个台湾裔美国人与另一个男人是恋人关系，同时又跟一个需要拿绿卡的女人结了婚。当时陈冲在中国已经是明星，但不久前刚刚搬到洛杉矶，她对出演这部影片很有兴趣。

“Getting married for a green card was something we all kind of thought about,” she said during a recent video interview from her home in San Francisco. “I had such a wedding myself. So it’s a great story.” (She has since remarried.)

“为了拿绿卡而结婚这种事，我们大家都曾有过那么点想法，”她最近在旧金山的家中接受视频采访时说道。“我自己就有过这样的一段婚姻。所以这是个很棒的故事。”（后来她再婚了。）

But it took years to get the funding and Chen never ended up playing the role of the bride. The actress, who turns 64 this month, plays the bride’s mother in the remake directed by Andrew Ahn, in theaters April 18.

但这部电影的资金筹措花了好几年时间，而陈冲最终也没有出演新娘这个角色。这位本月年满64岁的女演员在安德鲁·安执导的翻拍版《喜宴》中饰演了新娘的母亲，影片将于4月18日在影院上映。

“I feel like it’s some sort of a karma, it’s some sort of a closure,” she said, her voice growing almost wistful. “It’s also interesting, time passing yet we’re all still here. So fortunate. What a wonderful thing.”

“我觉得这就像是某种宿命，也算是某种了断，”她的话语间几乎带着点一丝惆怅。“时间流逝，可我们都还在这儿，这也挺有意思的。真是幸运。多么美好的一件事啊。”

The details of her character, May Chen, are a sign of the changing times: Rather than denying the sexuality of her daughter Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), May is a vocal L.G.B.T.Q. ally who gets down with lion dancers and a drag queen. Angela agrees to marry the boyfriend (Han Gi-chan) of her best friend (Bowen Yang) when the groom agrees to pay for in vitro fertilization treatments for the bride’s girlfriend (Lily Gladstone), in exchange for a chance to stay in the United States.

她所饰演的角色梅·陈的细节体现出了时代的变迁：梅非但没有否定女儿安吉拉（凯莉·玛丽·陈饰）的性取向，还是一个LGBTQ的热情支持者，能和舞狮者以及一位变装皇后融洽相处。安吉拉同意和她的好朋友（杨伯文饰）的男友（韩基灿饰）结婚，后者为了换取留在美国的机会，同意为新娘的女友（莉莉·格拉斯通饰）支付体外受精治疗的费用。

May is a funny, heartbreaking role that won Chen raves at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and it comes as she is in the midst of a career revival that began with her Independent Spirit Award-nominated performance in “Didi” (2024). In that coming-of-age story, directed by Sean Wang, she played the beleaguered mother of an awkward 13-year-old boy. For decades, Chen had all but given up on the U.S. film industry, choosing to work mainly in China, where she got her start when she was only 14. Now Hollywood is calling her back with more nuanced, sometimes silly, parts that show off her range. She’ll follow up “The Wedding Banquet” with “Oh. What. Fun.,” a Michael Showalter-directed Christmas comedy opposite Michelle Pfeiffer.

梅是个风趣但又令人心碎的角色，今年早些时候，陈冲的出演在圣丹斯电影节上赢得了赞誉。而此时她正处于事业复苏期，始于她在2024年电影《弟弟》(Didi)中的表演，后者获得了独立精神奖提名。在这部由王肖恩执导的成长故事片中，她饰演一个身处困境的母亲，养育了一个13岁的腼腆男孩。几十年来，陈冲几乎已经放弃了美国电影业，选择主要在中国工作，她14岁就在中国开启了演艺生涯。如今，好莱坞正以更有深度、有时显得滑稽的角色召唤她回归，展现她演技的全面。在《喜宴》之后，她将出演由迈克尔·肖沃尔特执导的圣诞喜剧《哦，多么有趣》(Oh. What. Fun.)，与米歇尔·菲佛演对手戏。

“I’m, in a way, becoming a character actor,” she said. “These were parts that I never thought about when I was younger. I always was a tragic person.”

“从某种程度上来说，我正在成为一名性格演员，”她说。“这些角色是我年轻时从未想过会去演的。我以前总是演悲情角色。”

Which is not to say that Chen’s career has been predictable. Raised in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, she won China’s Hundred Flowers Award for best actress when she was just a teenager. Even after she moved to the United States, she thought of acting as a “Plan B,” but she eventually got her breakthrough role as the opium-addicted empress in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning “The Last Emperor.”

但这不等于说陈冲有一个平淡无奇的演员生涯。她在“文革”时期的上海长大，十来岁时就获得了中国百花奖的最佳女演员奖。即使在移居美国后，她只是把表演当做“B计划”，不过在贝尔纳多·贝托鲁奇的奥斯卡获奖影片《末代皇帝》(The Last Emperor)中出演吸食鸦片成瘾的皇后，给她的职业生涯带来了突破。

A generation of David Lynch fans know her as the mill owner Josie Packard on “Twin Peaks”; Fewer people might realize she also directed the Winona Ryder-Richard Gere weepy “Autumn in New York” (2000) following her 1999 directing debut “Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl,” which she made in her home country in secret. Last year, she published an acclaimed Chinese nonfiction book about her family’s history.

整整一代大卫·林奇影迷是通过《双峰》(Twin Peaks)中的磨坊主乔茜·帕卡德这个角色认识她的；可能很少有人知道，在1999年秘密在中国拍摄了导演处女作《天浴》(Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl)之后，她还执导了由薇诺娜·瑞德和理查·基尔主演的催泪片《纽约的秋天》（Autumn in New York，2000年）。去年，她以中文出版了一本讲述家族历史的纪实文学作品，受到广泛好评。

She initially started to explore forms of creative expression other than acting when she felt she had fewer roles coming her way.

当她觉得自己的出演机会越来越少时，她也开始选择尝试表演以外的创作表达形式。

“It was a different era,” she said. “The parts that I played I’m considered this beautiful, exotic flower type, and by mid-30s, of course, this flower is wilted.” (Chen is being a little modest: The director Alice Wu said in a phone interview that she thought at first that Chen was too beautiful to play the pregnant mother in her 2005 film “Saving Face.”)

“那是一个不同的时代，”她说。“我以前演的角色都把我塑造成那种美丽又充满异域风情的花朵形象，而到了三十五六岁的时候，这朵花当然就凋谢了。”（陈冲这番话有些过谦：导演伍思薇在一次电话采访中说，她一开始觉得陈冲太漂亮了，不适合在她的2005年影片《面子》[Saving Face]中饰演那位怀孕的母亲。）

But Tran, Chen’s screen daughter in “The Wedding Banquet,” said that Chen is anything but jaded. “She has such a sense of childlike wonder that I feel is hard to come by when you’ve been in this industry for an amount of time and you’re a woman of color,” Tran said in a video call.

但是，在《喜宴》中饰演陈冲女儿的凯莉·玛丽·陈说，陈冲完全没有变得世故倦怠。“她有一种孩子般的好奇心，我觉得对于在这个行业摸爬滚打了很长时间的有色人种女性来说，这很难得的，”她在视频通话中说道。

That joy manifested during the first rehearsal when Ahn brought the queer lion dance troupe to work with the actors. May’s enthusiasm is meant to be deeply embarrassing for Angela, who believes her mother’s advocacy is a way of erasing her own flaws as a parent.

这种喜悦在第一次排练时就体现出来了，当时安德鲁·安带来了一个酷儿舞狮团和演员们一起合作。梅的热情本应让安吉拉感到无比尴尬，因为安吉拉认为母亲对LGBTQ群体的支持是在掩盖她自己作为父母的不足。

“Joan and the lion dance troupe, they were like, ‘Let’s bump and grind, let’s have the lion lick her butt,’” Ahn said. “Joan was so into it. No embarrassment, no shame, like she went for it.”

“陈冲和舞狮团，他们就是，‘来点热辣的，咱们让狮子去舔她的屁股吧’，”安德鲁·安说。“陈冲完全投入其中。一点也不觉得尴尬或难为情，好像她就好这口似的。”

Chen acknowledges that she has a “kooky side,” but in conversation she’s soft-spoken and deliberate with her words. Behind her is a bookcase adorned with framed photographs of her children. Motherhood, and the difficulties associated with it, have been a theme throughout Chen’s recent work as well as in her own life.

陈冲承认自己有“古怪的一面”，但在交谈中，她说话轻声细语，字斟句酌。她身后是一个书架，上面摆放着孩子们的照片。为人母以及与之相关的种种艰辛，一直是陈冲近期作品以及她个人生活中的一个主题。

“When my daughters were in their teens, there were some really very tumultuous times that we all had to learn and live through and so, in a way, I put my career on hold,” she said.

“我的女儿们十几岁的时候，我们经历了一些非常动荡的时期，我们都得去学习和面对这些，所以我在某种程度上是暂停了自己的事业，”她说。

Wang said that he cast Chen in “Didi” in part because she was able to embody the identities of both a “movie star and an immigrant mom.” And Chen said that the film not only brought renewed attention to her acting, but also felt like a “cathartic, redemptive experience for my motherhood.” Her daughter Audrey Hui, also an actress, joined her on set, occasionally serving as her stand-in.

王肖恩说，他让陈冲出演《弟弟》，部分原因是她能够同时诠释“电影明星”和“移民母亲”这两种身份。陈冲则表示，这部电影不仅让人们重新关注到了她的表演，而且对她来说，这感觉就像是“我的母亲身份的一种宣泄和救赎体验”。她的女儿、同为演员的许文珊来到片厂探班，偶尔还会充当陈冲的替身。

Chen has found herself frequently playing a fictionalized version of a filmmaker’s mother — not just in “Didi,” but also in “Saving Face” and, to a certain extent, now in “The Wedding Banquet.” When she and Ahn first had a conversation over Zoom, they mostly spoke about their own families rather than the details of the movie. Still, her personal connection was vital to her performance.

陈冲发现自己经常扮演的是导演母亲的虚构版——不仅是在《弟弟》中，在《面子》里也是如此，在某种程度上，现在的《喜宴》也是。当她和安德鲁·安第一次通过视频通话交流时，他们主要聊的是各自的家庭，而不是电影的细节。尽管如此，她与角色的个人情感联系对她的表演至关重要。

“It has been an ongoing learning curve, an ongoing lesson, and a lot of regrets in my own being a mother, the kind of pain and suffering in situations that you actually get to use in your work which is very cathartic, healing in a way,” she said. “In ‘Wedding Banquet’ she evidently hurt her child very much, and I do realize that even with the best of intentions and the most fierce love you are clueless.”

“这一直是一个不断学习的过程，一堂持续的课，而且在我自己为人母的过程中也有很多遗憾，那种痛苦和煎熬，你实际上可以运用到创作中，这让人感觉很畅快，某种程度上是一种疗愈，”她说。“在《喜宴》中，她显然深深地伤害了自己的孩子，而且我也意识到，即使怀着最美好的初衷和最浓烈的爱，你还是会完全意识不到。”

Chen’s own experience also heightened the tenderness of her performance. Tran remembered being stunned when, during an emotional scene, Chen, unscripted, reached over and wiped the snot from running from her fictional daughter’s nose. Chen was nonchalant about that decision.

陈冲自己的经历也让她的表演更添温柔。凯莉·玛丽·陈记得，在一场情感戏中，陈冲没有按照剧本，而是伸手帮她戏中的女儿擦掉了流出来的鼻涕，这让她十分震惊。而陈冲对自己的这个举动却显得毫不在意。

“It comes naturally for a mother,” Chen said. “So I felt it was the right choice.”

“对一个母亲来说，这是很自然的举动，”陈冲说。“所以我觉得这是正确的选择。”

Chen’s recent success has also reminded her of the parts of the Hollywood machine she doesn’t like. She’s not a fan, for instance, of laborious press tours. “It’s so against my personality,” she said. “I’m more of a loner. I stay at home. I read a book. I’m a bit antisocial.”

陈冲最近取得的成功也让她回想起好莱坞这台机器中那些她不喜欢的部分。例如，她不喜欢辛苦的巡回宣传。“这太不符合我的性格了，”她说。“我更像是一个独来独往的人。我喜欢呆在家里，读读书。我有点不太合群。”

She does, however, have a renewed energy. She attributes that to a phone call she had on her 60th birthday with her own mother, who at the time was hospitalized with cancer.

然而，她确实重新焕发了活力。她把这归功于自己60岁生日时和因癌症住院的母亲的一通电话。

“I thought by 30 I should be done, but at 60 all of a sudden I woke up,” she said. “I think everything that I’ve been doing from that day on is pointing me to something to say. Before I leave this Earth, there is something I’m yet to do.”

“我原本以为自己到30岁就该结束演艺生涯了，但到了60岁，我突然醒过来了，”她说。“我觉得从那天起我所做的一切都在指引我去表达一些东西。在我离开这个世界之前，还有一些事情我必须去做。”