Star Wars: The Last Jedi actor Kelly Marie Tran breaks silence on online harassment, toxic fan culture

Star Wars: The Last Jedi  actor Kelly Marie Tran opened up about the online harassment that caused her to wipe her social media accounts earlier this year. In a column published in The New York Times, Tran said the trolling impacted her in a negative way, strengthening her own insecurities of growing up as an Asian kid in America. She wrote it “wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them.” [caption id=“attachment_5020041” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Image via Twitter[/caption] After being subjected to severe sexist and racist trolling for her role of Rose Tico in the Star Wars film, Tran deleted her Instagram account in June. She added the words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of colour had taught her, that she belonged “in margins and spaces.” She started blaming herself and felt brainwashed into believing her existence was “limited to the boundaries of another person’s approval.” “Their words reinforced a narrative I had heard my whole life: that I was ‘other’ that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t good enough, simply because I wasn’t like them. And that feeling, I realize now, was, and is, shame, a shame for the things that made me different, a shame for the culture from which I came from. And to me, the most disappointing thing was that I felt it at all,” she wrote. However, Tran said she may have grown up in a white-dominated world but she wants to leave a different world behind — a world in which people of all races and genders are seen as human beings. Tran will reprise her role as Rose Tico in next year’s Star Wars: Episode IX . (With inputs from agencies)