Kelly Marie Tran has addressed the sharp increase in anti-Asian hate crime.
Tran – who lends her voice to Disney’s first Southeast Asian princess in Raya and the Last Dragon – opened up about the subject during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
“It’s been really, really difficult I think to feel so many feelings at once,” she said. “It’s such a difficult time for the Asian-American community and I think it hits everyone different.
“So many of my friends have been talking about, ‘Okay, what are the ways that we can productively help?’ and also recognising that we all need to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves and our mental health at the same time.”
Tran became the target of online abuse after she was cast as Rose Tico in Rian Johnson’s 2017 film Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
In 2018, the actor deleted her social media accounts due to the harassment.
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That same year, Tran opened up about the online abuse she faced in an essay for The New York Times, writing: “Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of colour already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.”
Tran told DeGeneres: “For me, something that has been really strange about it is I’m here talking about Raya – this movie that is celebrating this part of the world that very rarely gets to be celebrated – and having that dichotomy of celebrating this part of the world and also acknowledging these horrible things that are happening at the same time has been a very wild experience.”
The 32-year-old added that she hoped Raya and the Last Dragon will offer audiences some comfort.
Her comments follow a series of hate crimes against Asian-Americans.
Three shootings at Atlanta spas last week (17 March) saw eight people killed, six of whom were Asian women.
A study by the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino found that hate crimes against Asian-Americans in 16 cities rose by 150 per cent in 2020.
UK police data suggests there has been a 300 per cent increase in hate crimes towards people of Chinese, East and Southeast Asian heritage in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the same period in 2018 and 2019.
