Kelly Marie Tran “left the internet for [her] own sanity” after being subjected to bullying following her ‘Star Wars’ role.
Kelly Marie Tran
The 32-year-old actress was subjected to racist and misogynistic bullying after landing a role as Rose in the 2017 movie ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’, which eventually led her to delete her social media accounts and withdraw from public life.
And after discussing her decision to step away in a 2018 essay for the New York Times, Kelly Marie has now said the experience felt like she “fell in love very publicly and then very publicly had an embarrassingly horrible breakup”.
She explained: “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 … it was basically me being like, ‘Oh, this isn’t good for my mental health. I’m obviously going to leave this.’
“I left. I said no to a lot of things. 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 realised, I didn’t know how I felt anymore. And I didn’t remember why I was in this in the first place.”
Kelly Marie spent her time out of the spotlight reminding herself of who she was before she found success as part of the mammoth sci-fi franchise.
She added: “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 before ‘Star Wars’, before any of this. And I needed to find that again.”
And after receiving therapy to manage her mental health after her experience with online harassment, the actress said she’s learned how to cope with trolls.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, she said: “If someone doesn’t understand me or my experience, it shouldn’t be my place to have to internalise their misogyny or racism or all of the above. Maybe they just don’t have the imagination to understand that there are different types of people living in the world.”