Joan Chen’s daughter wants her to get some media training. “I think you are having your renaissance,” she told her mother recently, “and I don’t think you know how to do these things.” They were talking about the months ahead on the Hollywood promo circuit. Chen was coming off of rave reviews for Dìdi, which won a Sundance Audience Award and is hitting select theaters on Friday via Focus Features; her performance had pundits pegging Chen as an early Oscar contender this year. Tributes and retrospective offers started pouring in. “It was very strange,” Chen says now. “I didn’t know that [people] would talk about or even care about my career in any way.”

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

For the record, Chen didn’t get media training. She doesn’t even know where one goes for that. But the 63-year-old Shanghai native hardly needs it. “She has this presence that’s both grand and grounded,” Dìdi director, Sean Wang, says.

In 1980, when she was still in her teens, Chen won China’s equivalent of the best-actress Oscar and ascended to instantaneous, massive fame in her home country. By 30, she’d played the female lead in the Oscar-winning phenomenon The Last Emperor and joined the main cast of David Lynch’s Emmy-winning cult classic Twin Peaks. By 40 she’d directed both a prize-winning critical darling (Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl) and a $65 million-budgeted, MGM-backed romance starring Richard Gere and Winona Ryder (Autumn in New York).

Yet, at least in the US, Chen flew under the radar for decades. For much of her career, she’s navigated a paltry selection of parts—the reality for any actor of Asian descent from her generation—while continuing to work consistently in China. So, yes, grand and grounded. Over tea in Beverly Hills, Chen carries the glamour and authority of a seasoned star as well as the looseness and buoyancy of a working actor who’s never had the chance to take it all for granted.

Chen’s earliest work onscreen established her as a true movie star, someone who’s mesmerizing in every frame. Raised during the Cultural Revolution in ’60s and ’70s Shanghai, she managed to avoid Mao Zedong’s Down to the Countryside Movement policy—which forced most of her peers to relocate to a remote rural area—when she was plucked from school to join the Shanghai Film Studio at 14 years old. Chen made her debut in a film called Youth before wowing audiences as an abandoned teenager in Little Flower, winning the Hundred Flowers Award for best actress. Chen became instantly, blindingly famous: “I would be on a street in any city, and there would be thousands of people falling down hurting themselves, crowding me, their bicycles all trampled, and I wouldn’t be able to get out,” she told The New York Times in 1999. “That scared me.”

When she moved to California at age 20, Chen had no expectations. She worked in a restaurant, studied film at California State University, Northridge, and took whatever roles came her way. One of her first meetings in Los Angeles was with an aspiring Taiwanese filmmaker named Ang Lee, who was fresh out of NYU and hoping to cast Chen as the female lead in The Wedding Banquet. Lee felt like he was introducing himself to “the biggest star in Chinese cinema at the time,” but Chen remembers being wide-eyed: “I was fresh off the boat, basically, from China…. I didn’t see it as a meeting.” The project wound up being delayed for years—“the movie was too Chinese to raise money in America and too gay to raise money in Taiwan,” Lee says now—though Lee and Chen would work together many years later in Lust, Caution, Lee’s first movie after winning an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain.

Chen will happily admit now that she had no idea what she was doing back then. When a classmate of hers suggested she get an agent, Chen asked what an agent was. She settled on the Bessie Loo Agency, which she heard represented “every Asian.” Chen took a bus to their office—which was empty save a secretary and one agent named Guy Lee, who after signing her told Chen she needed a more glamorous headshot. (The example he showed her was “very Anna May Wong.”) He laughed when he read the best-actress accolade on her résumé, assuming she had made it up. “He looked at me and he didn’t think I looked Chinese!” Chen says. “But I didn’t have an expectation of needing to be treated equally.”

Her first Hollywood movie, the Hong Kong-set Tai-Pan, was widely panned for its offensive stereotypes. It also rankled the Chinese government. “I was renounced—people were treating me like, ‘Oh, you betrayed China, you are a traitor,’” Chen says. Both while making the film—she played a stock concubine role—and on the ensuing press tour, Chen felt out of her element. “You tried your best to put on a show—everything was an imitation,” she says. “It was a little absurd, but…I didn’t learn to complain until I met many more Asian American actors. I felt, ‘That’s what being a foreigner in America is like.’”

Her breakout came a few years later in The Last Emperor, which went on to win the best-picture Oscar. She has long credited the director, Bernardo Bertolucci, with introducing her to the “romance” of making movies. As Wanrong, the ultimately tragic empress of China, Chen showed off the movie-star magic she’d harnessed back in China. Oliver Stone, who directed Chen years later in Heaven & Earth, wrote in The New York Times that she had “never been better,” highlighting her ability to hold the camera: “Just watch her expression as she moves.”

The Last Emperor won nine Oscars in total. And yet, star John Lone wasn’t recognized. Neither was Chen in the supporting category. “It didn’t even cross people’s minds,” Chen says. Though producer Jeremy Thomas says that both actors received standard awards campaigns, the production just couldn’t rally support for either of them—a sadly common trend for otherwise acclaimed movies that aren’t in English. (See also Parasite, whose cast was snubbed despite the film’s impressive Oscar haul.)

“It’s something that I was shocked by at the time, and unhappy about and felt guilty about,” Thomas says. “That was shameful…. Today, I’d hope, that would be unthinkable.” Yet that reality speaks to what life was like for Chen even after The Last Emperor. While she had clout, the quality of material coming her way largely went unchanged. “The roles were terrible,” she says flatly—mostly concubines and dragon ladies. At first, she didn’t even think to be offended. “America was exotic to me, and I knew I was exotic to America,” she says. Years into working in the industry, however, she learned that “this otherness was painful.”

Twin Peaks was a thrilling exception. Chen says that Lynch taught her how to be spontaneous. When I ask for an example, she cracks up—after all, Chen’s run on the show ended with her character turning into a literal wooden doorknob. When wasn’t she on her toes?

Still, one moment stands out. Chen was filming a scene with Ray Wise, who played the spiraling father of the murdered Laura Palmer. He started improvising, walking by Chen and saying something to her she couldn’t understand. After hearing cut, he instantly apologized to her. Chen didn’t know why he seemed so distraught. “David told me to come by and whisper in your ear—I don’t use that word,” Wise told Chen. Confused, she asked what he said. “He said, ‘I whispered cunt. David wanted to see your face.” Chen stared at him blankly. “I didn’t get it,” she says now, laughing. “I didn’t know the word!”

The class of female directors working in the ’90s was vanishingly small. Among that group, Chen is likely the only one to make her debut while evading Chinese authorities. She had been sent a version of “Celestial Bath,” a story by writer Geling Yan about a teenager from Chengdu who’s sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Chen felt an immediate, cellular need to turn it into a film, in part because she wasn’t finding artistic satisfaction in acting. The resulting film, Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl, was filmed deep in remote areas of Tibet. It’s remarkably assured and uncompromising, with a scope much vaster than its guerrilla production would seem to promise. Chen had to stay undetected while making the film, whose subject the Chinese government would never approve of about a harrowing collective experience that she had narrowly evaded. “I realize now that was one of the very rare films that actually talked about this,” she says. “It was 20 million people, an entire generation’s sacrifice, and our collective loss of youth and coming of age.”

The movie premiered to acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival before winning awards across continents, from Paris to Fort Lauderdale. But China blacklisted Xiu Xiu, and then blacklisted Chen herself, charging her a fine and banning her from working in the country for three full years. The punishment didn’t bother her in the slightest: “I knew what I did.” She’s worked in China regularly since the ban ended.

Chen jumped from helming Xiu Xiu to Autumn in New York, a studio-backed tearjerker about a restauranteur (Richard Gere) who falls for a terminally ill haberdasher (Winona Ryder). The film’s initial director had departed due to creative differences; unbeknownst to Chen, producers needed an eleventh-hour replacement. One Asian American backer on the movie had seen Xiu Xiu and suggested Chen. Producers laughed in response. “They said, ‘Jesus, are we that desperate? We are getting this Chinese movie star to direct this?’” Chen says. “They started guffawing—which I learned later.”

She helmed the movie but felt restricted by the process, unable to express her vision and in turn unwilling to take in much feedback. Critics were harsh. Audiences didn’t show up as needed. Chen felt “burned” by the whole experience, and turned subsequent directing offers down. “I didn’t want to do that again,” she says. She hasn’t made a narrative feature since, but Wang still sees her as a “trailblazer” for directing movies at all. “Me as a younger filmmaker coming up, I get to be inspired by people like her and Lulu Wang and Lee Isaac Chung,” says the 29-year-old Dìdi director. “I’m in this new wave of younger filmmakers who have a little bit more confidence because of the filmmakers that came before [us], to lean into the stories that are personal to us.”

Chen has long worked fluidly between China and the United States, with richer roles in her native country typically at her disposal. She’s also brilliantly anchored smaller movies like The Home Song Stories, portraying a nightclub singer struggling to raise two children in ’70s Australia, and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, another subversive portrait of mid-20th-century China. “That movie took so much of me—and she was very understanding, very helpful, very supportive,” Lee tells me. “I had meltdowns many times. One she actually witnessed.”

For the most part, though, Chen has quietly hummed along. Scan her IMDB and you’ll spot increasingly fascinating, daring choices—eschewing Hollywood’s narrow framing, even if that meant operating on the fringes. Only now is she noticing a shift in visibility—and material. “So there is life after 50,” she says to me at one point, almost as if having the revelation herself. She was a wicked, borderline unhinged delight in 2019’s Chinese crime thriller Sheep Without a Shepherd, as a corrupt and extreme police chief. The next year, she stole Alan Yang’s Tigertail in one emotional powerhouse of a scene. When Sean Wang saw that film, he realized Chen was the right person to play his mother.

A semi-autobiographical reflection on Wang’s teenage years in the Bay Area, Dìdi stars mostly first-time actors (as well as Izaac Wang as our titular boy and Wang’s own grandmother, Chang Li Hua, the subject of his Oscar-nominated short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó) and progresses as a moving coming-of-age tale. But unlike most of its kind, the movie approaches its matriarch, Chen’s Chungsing, with rigorous empathy. Chen spent a lot of time with Wang’s own mother, and actually brought her own college-aged daughter to work on the set as a PA. “Both my daughters had very tumultuous teenage years, and I had a lot of learning,” she says. “So to have my daughter see me play a mother for someone else…just felt so emotional and redemptive.” She speaks a bit more softly here. “It was cathartic.”

Wang couldn’t picture the film without Chen in it. “The first meeting I had with her was over Zoom. She spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to turn on the camera,” he says affectionately. “But she came prepared, and she asked so many deep, thoughtful questions about the character that really, really pushed me and challenged me to think deeper about both the story and her character—how to make that the most layered, and rich, and nuanced version of it.”

In the edit, this meant cutting many of Chen’s lines—because she so fully inhabited Chungsing that every feeling, every register, was there in her eyes. “They communicate such longing, and regret, and pain, and love,” Wang says. It’s the same ineffable quality she’s brought to movies since she was a teenage phenomenon in China, and that has too rarely been showcased in American movies.

Young filmmakers are now seeing Chen, writing for her, and offering her space in a way that feels different. In a true full circle moment, Chen recently wrapped production on the upcoming remake of Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, directed by Fire Island’s Andrew Ahn. She’s playing the loudly accepting mother of a queer daughter (Kelly Marie Tran) whose earlier years in parenting weren’t quite as openhearted. It’s a funny, gloriously silly, but also sometimes sad role.

“When I first met with Andrew on Zoom, he was talking extensively about his own mother to inform the relationship between me and my daughter in the film,” she says. These directors “are able to express more honestly, truthfully, and authentically their own experiences—not selling what Hollywood’s so-called accepted version of being what Asians should be.” Wang concurs: “Hopefully as a result, there are more roles for people like her, because now people like me are looking at our parents in a way that’s like, ‘Oh, they’re not just our parents.’”

Chen senses the impact. She’s shocked by the Oscar buzz trailing her, having spent close to four decades in Hollywood without it. She’s noticing interest in her past swell at the same time that her present is finally generating attention. She recently did a special screening of Xiu Xiu at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and streamers are starting to ask her about putting it on their platforms. “I’m like, I don’t even know where to find it. Where is my cut negative?” she says with a laugh.

Honestly, excessive noise makes her nervous. “It’s too much,” Chen says. Still, she’s ready to support Dìdi however she can—if not with media training, then maybe with a few more social media posts. “My daughter just resurrected my Instagram, and she was telling me yesterday, ‘Mom, you didn’t touch it for the past three weeks!’” Chen says. “Tonight I will probably take care of it.” It’s a start.