Photo: Slaven Vlasic/Getty
Kelly Marie Tran is getting candid about how harassment after herStar Warscasting impacted her mental health and her decision to leave social media.
The actress eventually wiped her social media and withdrew from public life after penning an emotional essay forThe New York Timeshitting back at the bullying. Her character’s screen time was later significantly reduced in 2019’sStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Now, the actress, who stars as the latest Disney princess inRaya and the Last Dragon,toldThe Hollywood Reporterthat the entireStar Warsexperience felt like she “fell in love very publicly and then very publicly had an embarrassingly horrible breakup.”
“If someone doesn’t understand me or my experience, it shouldn’t be my place to have to internalize their misogyny or racism or all of the above,” she added of what she learned in therapy after the harassment. “Maybe they just don’t have the imagination to understand that there are different types of people living in the world.”
“What’s interesting to me about working in this industry is that certain things become so public, even if you don’t really mean them to be, [like] the succession of events in which I left the internet for my own sanity,” she added. “It was basically me being like, ‘Oh, this isn’t good for my mental health. I’m obviously going to leave this.’ "
Still, the bullying took a toll on Tran, who explained her need to hide away for a time.
“I left. I said no to a lot of things,” she said of her career post-Star Wars. “It felt like I was just hearing the voice of my agents and my publicity team and all of these people telling me what to say and what to do and how to feel. And I realized, I didn’t know how I felt anymore. And I didn’t remember why I was in this in the first place.
“Any time that happens, I have to close up shop and go away for a while and really interact in the real world — read books and journal and go on hikes and look at a tree and remind myself that there was a fire that burned inside of me beforeStar Wars, before any of this. And I needed to find that again.”
Raya and the Last Dragonhits Disney+ premier access and select theaters on Friday.
source: people.com
