A biography for Kelly Marie Tranhasn’t been written yet.
“So many people don't realise you need to be on a certain level of Maslow's hierarchy to have a dream: you have to have food and be safe from danger, all these things my parents didn't have at the get go, so I, from the very beginning, believe I have been living for multiple generations, for my parents and grandparents.”
“You get the initial script, and then things sort of change here and there, but the whole thing is this sort of mushy collaboration, which I love.”
“My dad was a street kid for seven years - he was homeless.”
“I actually read 'The Last Jedi' before 'The Force Awakens' came out. It totally helped me, though! The idea of this franchise that I already knew was such a big cultural thing, I was sort of given this freedom to be honest with that character and not have this pressure of making her something else that we had already seen in this universe.”
“I truly did feel that I owed it to my parents, my grandparents, to do whatever it was that I wanted, because if I wasn't happy, if I wasn't being true to myself, then I wasn't living fully. They had given up so much so that I could live at the level that so many people are just automatically born into.”
“You search for images and stories and movies and music from people that look like you and sound like you and speak like you because you want to feel like, 'Oh, if they can do it, so can I.' There's a little bit of that need for validation, especially when you're younger and trying to look to someone to look up to.”
“I want to work with great directors and tell great stories - storytelling is the one great love of my life, and it means so much, and we have the ability to change the world by telling stories, and I want to keep doing that.”
“When you're really young, you tend to fall in love with characters. If you start seeing the same type of character everywhere and realize that they don't look like you, or they don't speak like you, you start wanting to change who you are. That's something that I did when I was a young kid.”
“I feel like I'm always talking about myself, and I love not talking about myself.”
“I think that Carrie is such an icon, not just as someone who played Princess Leia, but someone who was groundbreaking in that she was OK with being honest - brutally so, unapologetically so.”
“You find little ways to keep your mind at peace so that you can, at the end of the day, do the most important thing, which is do a good job.”
“I knew what it was like growing up in a world where I never saw myself in anything.”
“I was a food tour guide - I took people on a tour to different restaurants in the area.”
“In terms of the timeline, 'The Force Awakens' came out in December of 2015. I got the role in November of 2015. I was auditioning and waiting to hear back when their marketing machine was everywhere. It's like you're going for something that's so high stakes, and you try to remind yourself, 'Okay, stop thinking about it,' and it's everywhere.”
“I feel like 'The Last Jedi' is a lot of things that people aren't going to expect, which I think is a good thing.”
“There are so few times in life where you are passionate about anything. And I think that if you can find that, you should just hold on to it and protect it at all costs and just follow it, because it's so rare.”
“I do feel like my improv training has helped me throughout my entire audition process only because the idea of 'yes and-ing' applies to everything.”
“'Star Wars' is so much bigger than any single person involved, so you feel like you want to do that justice and also feel like you want to do justice to that little girl inside me that never saw anyone who looked like her, that person who's starving for representation - it's a lot.”
“It never felt like we were making a 'Star Wars' movie. It didn't feel like it was serious. It just felt like we were allowed to be creative and kind of goof off.”
“I worked in an office. I was like an assistant. So, I would just answer phone calls, coordinate events. It was a great day job. I worked with amazing people, but obviously, whenever you are doing something that's not your dream, you kind of feel like, 'Oh, I'm on this grind.'”