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 big-
gest 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 per-
fectly, 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 gros-
grain 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 flaw-
less 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.”
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 con-
firmed 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 com-
petitive 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.”
Chan recounts another story of her younger, schoolgirl self,
her jaw shut tight, soldiering home in blood-stained socks with-
out 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, work-
ing at a mall perfume counter—was as a lifeguard. She assures
me it was not glamorous, joking that it “basically involved clean-
ing 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 sug-
gest 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.”
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 estab-
lished 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 shy-
ness 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 mea-
sure of people before I necessarily give them all of me.” She
does let me do most of the talking at first and, during our con-
versation, lets out a torrent of thoughts on a topic before stop-
ping short, as if remembering that I am both a stranger and a
reporter, becoming more reserved until a familiar or provoca-
tive 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.
Due to the dearth of Asian actresses with significant fame,
Chan has become a de facto standard-bearer for Asian repre-
sentation in film and TV. I assumed that she would be tired of
talking about it after doing so in nearly every interview during
her Crazy Rich Asians press tour and countless others. She is
not. She is fully Chinese by heritage, but Chan describes her
racial identity as “compound. I feel British, and European, and
English, and Chinese, and Asian.” She brings up the Internet