Interview with Jeremy Hoffman of ‘The Wedding Banquet’

Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet was a landmark queer Asian American film in 1993. Lighthearted on its surface, the film explores the crushing and pervasive nature of heteronormativity. Particularly noteworthy is its exploration of queerness in conversation with a precarious Taiwanese identity: heterosexuality in the film is also a marker of cultural strength, and procreation continues a national and familial tradition.

With his reimagined version of the 1993 film coming out this week in theatres, Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet operates with an inverse emotional and stylistic framework – the tone is generally more somber and realistic, using close-up and intimate framings of the characters and warm coloring. The cinematographer of the 1993 The Wedding Banquet, Jong Lin, places the characters in a New York City that looks and feels like the romantic comedies of the late 80s and early 90s; the cinematographer of this year’s reimagining, Ki Jin Kim, frames scenes as dramatic character studies. While Lee’s film examines the pain of queer experience, the key emotion running through Ahn’s film is joy, exploring the beauty and multiplicity of queer community.

A notable change from the original The Wedding Banquet to the reimagining is the central theming of queer community. While Lee’s film focused primarily on a singular gay couple, Ahn’s film features an interethnic gay Asian couple and interracial lesbian couple, none of whom are white. The notion of chosen family is operative to Ahn’s reimagining, too: these characters have queer friends and relatives. 

Jeremy Hoffman plays Marshall, the executive director of a Seattle LGBTQIA+ non-profit. Chosen family was at the forefront of Hoffman’s mind throughout the process. “We all have our family that we may disagree with, and then we have friends that are so close to become our chosen family. And I want viewers to see that at the end of the day, you have options and you have support from other people, aside from who you're related to by blood, and that you have choices in who you want to invite in your life.”

Hoffman and I bonded over our curiosity toward the lack of queer intra-community relationships onscreen and remarked on how different this lack is to our reality. Hoffman remarks on this change in new queer representation; “Now we have more openness with couples living together, when before, it kind of was more of a secret. . .although even in Asian culture, we're still working towards that.” In 1993, the AIDS crisis looms large over Wai-Tung and Simon and it will be 18 years before they could marry in New York City; in 2025 there’s no legal barrier to marriage for either of the queer couples in Ahn’s take. 

Acting in this film was a unique and positive experience for Hoffman: “Most of the cast and most of the crew were queer, so there was [this feeling of] openness, where we've gone through similar things, and we we know how to talk to each other, and we know what buttons we can push. . .It was really nice that we could joke with each other a lot.”

An on-set memory Hoffman shared included film icon Joan Chen’s (May Chen) phone going off during a take of his pivotal scene. After he realized it was her, she joked around with him, contributing to the sense of camaraderie. 

Hoffman also talked about his experience working with director Andrew Ahn: “Andrew, who's an amazing director, is so collaborative with his actors. He gets to just say, ‘Hey, how? How can we make this better? What do you think about adding your own little spin to this?’ So it was a really open environment.”

Such a collaborative environment is crucial for a film that tackles heavy topics like Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet. Ahn gives his actors space and time to breathe and explore. Despite the heaviness of the story, there are still numerous comedic moments to return to that thematic undercurrent of queer joy. For Hoffman, this film affected his approach to life: “No matter how hard a situation you're in, there will be a time to laugh about it, and there will be comedy to life. And so I think that's kind of stuck with me. That if I'm going through something really hard, I can take a step back and think, ‘Okay, life will move on, and maybe later on, I can laugh about this.’”

Throughout our conversation, Hoffman emphasized how special it was to have positive and diverse queer stories. He has hopes for the future of queer representation, and the future for young queer Asian kids seeing movies that represent them: “It is so lovely to see that. I think, oh, maybe someone who's nine or 10 can see that, and be like, ‘Okay, that's alright...there's a little bit of me in there, and it's totally okay to be who I am.’ And even people who are later in life, who might not have had the courage to live who they are. I hope they see that it's really okay and it's starting to become more widely accepted.”

Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet is in theatres everywhere now.