COVER SHOOTS
Gemma Chan Wants to End Whitewashing — In Hollywood and in History Books
With a law degree from Oxford and a license to kill in Captain Marvel, Gemma Chan has the world by the tail. For our latest cover story, the actress opens up to Jessica Chia about her love of Hamilton, Hollywood's glass ceiling, and the importance of representation for all — now and in our history books.
BY JESSICA CHIA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAOLA KUDACKI
MARCH 19, 2019
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Gemma Chan is perched on a chair in her dimly lit hotel room, barefoot, hair pulled back into a bun that didn’t quite catch the front pieces. She is telling me that all she wants, after the biggest year yet in her career, is to get a dog. A rescue, probably. For the first time all night, she is just Gemma.
Moments earlier, she was holding court in a voluminous, rose-colored couture gown. It was like a scene in a movie: two seamstresses flitting about her, making sure that her crinoline petticoat is fluffed just so, that the train grazes the floor perfectly, and that the ruffle on the gown’s bodice flounces at just the right height, all done under the direction of designer Jason Wu. With newfound fame comes newfound scrutiny. The grosgrain ribbon she deftly lobbied to be sewn on at the waist would be noted in the press a week later.
And yet even after the fitting, in a comfy gray sweater and cropped jeans, she still exudes an otherworldly quality. That’s partly due to her measured, soft, and properly British way of speaking and partly due to her looks. Her face is symmetrical to a degree that seems statistically improbable, complete with high cheekbones, bright eyes, and full lips, which may explain why she’s often cast in extraordinary roles: the self-sacrificing android Mia in the British TV series Humans, Nick Young’s flawless but troubled cousin Astrid in Crazy Rich Asians, and most recently, the sharp-shooting space sniper Minn-Erva in Captain Marvel. “I’m not allowed to talk about it very much,” Chan says, “but she’s part of an elite special-forces team that Brie Larson’s character is part of, and Jude Law is our commander. She’s a sniper, and she’s very, very good at her job.”
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Speaking of which, Chan almost had another career entirely. She graduated from Oxford University in 2004 with a law degree and was offered a job with a leading law firm in London but turned it down. Instead, she enrolled at the prestigious Drama Centre in London. Prestigious or not, Chan has publicly confirmed that her parents, both hardworking Chinese immigrants who earned advanced degrees in Scotland against tremendous odds (in her father’s case, surviving two years of homelessness and putting his five siblings through school), thought the move to drama was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.
Chan’s laundry list of accomplishments (she was also a competitive swimmer and almost became a professional violinist) strongly suggests exacting, overachiever tendencies. But it’s not so simple. “I was away on an orchestra trip in Italy, and I went missing for a night. They freaked out, thinking I’d gotten lost, but I was in a boys’ room smoking and drinking,” Chan says. “I behaved pretty badly.” She was 12 years old. I tell her about my first drinking experience, in my early teens, drinking vodka straight. “Oh, my God. Did you pass out?” she asks. I did not. I can really hold my liquor. A smile flashes across her face. “I can really hold my liquor as well.”
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Chan recounts another story of her younger, schoolgirl self, her jaw shut tight, soldiering home in blood-stained socks without shedding a single tear after falling from her scooter. It strikes me as extremely fitting when I learn that one of her many early jobs — stocking shelves in the U.K. drugstore chain Boots, working at a mall perfume counter — was as a lifeguard. She assures me it was not glamorous, joking that it “basically involved cleaning people’s pubes from the shower drain.” She does not tell me that she prevented a little girl from drowning until I offer that I was also a lifeguard but never attempted a rescue. When I suggest that she saved a life, she looks visibly uncomfortable and explains: “I saw a girl in trouble. She must have been three or four. But she was within reach, so I just scooped her out. It wasn’t anything major.”
Then there was the time she saw a man on the sidewalk near a train station get stabbed in the neck. It was rush hour, and she was on her way to see a play. “No one else seemed to notice. People were kind of stepping around him. I went to go help the guy. I turned him over, and then I looked up and just locked eyes with his attacker,” Chan says. “In that moment I thought, This is it. He’s going to come back and stab me, and I probably won’t be able to outrun him.” Luckily, a train pulled into the station, a stream of people exited, and the attacker disappeared into the crowd. Chan asked a passerby to call for medical help. Thinking quickly, she urged another to take a photo of the attacker as he made his getaway. The victim died before the ambulance arrived, but she was able to identify the attacker and later served as a witness in the trial. “I still replay it in my mind. Should I have stuck my fingers in the guy’s neck and tried to, like, hold [a vein]?” she says. “I don’t know.”
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Clearly, Chan is not timid in a crisis. But she insists that she is “actually quite shy” and “socially awkward” and that she works hard to mask it. I am surprised that this is one of the few things she tells me outright about her personality, particularly when I think back to our first interaction. She playfully peered over the top of the railing next to the booth where I was sitting, called my name, smiled brightly when I confirmed it was me, and bounded up the stairs to our booth.
Within five minutes, she had established that my dress and her Breton-stripe shirt were from the same store (an offshoot of the fashion brand H&M called "& Other Stories"), asked about my day, found out where I was from, and ordered us olives to munch on while we sipped orange juice (her, trying to detox from a battery of awards-season after-parties) and wine (me, trying to summon the courage to ask personal questions) and waited for our entrées (both, pasta). She stops midconversation, conspiratorially, and enlists me to people-watch with her. (She thinks she may recognize someone in the booth closest to us.)
So it’s for good reason that I remain dubious about her shyness claim until she puts a finer point on it: “In a new social situation, I’d much rather sit back and let other people talk first,” Chan says. “I prefer to listen and, I suppose, get the measure of people before I necessarily give them all of me.” She does let me do most of the talking at first and, during our conversation, lets out a torrent of thoughts on a topic before stopping short, as if remembering that I am both a stranger and a reporter, becoming more reserved until a familiar or provocative thought warms her up again. She may think of herself as shy, but she comes across as thoughtful. And acutely self-aware. In all fairness, she has to be.
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