Joan Chen got her first taste of fame as the teen star of “Little Flower” (or “Xiao hua”), a melodramatic war epic released in her native China eight years before her big international breakout in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” a 1987 Columbia Pictures release that won nine Oscars, including best picture. Chinese fans still come up to her to gush about the earlier film. “I was being mobbed on the street, and every family had a calendar with my face on it,” she says of the film’s reception in China when she was just 18.
But for many years, she and her parents saw acting as a temporary job, something to do until she landed on her real vocation. Only years after moving to the U.S.
to find a career did Chen realize she already had one. That career has been treating her well lately, thanks to a series of roles juicier than most she has encountered as a performer. In “Didi,” Sean Wang’s biting coming-of-age drama about an angst-ridden Bay Area adolescent (Izaac Wang) finding his way, she plays Chungsing, a mother trying to balance parenting duties with her dreams of painting.
She played an AI tech titan in the 2023 FX series “A Murder at the End of the World.” Soon she’ll star in a reimagining of the 1993 Ang Lee rom-com “The Wedding Banquet,” and, alongside Michelle Pfeiffer, in Michael Showalter’s Christmas comedy “Oh. What.
Fun.” “I don’t think I’ve had as busy a year in North America for a very, very long time,” she s.
