Gemma Chan, the actress who outgrew perfect roles and bet seven years on Josephine

Gemma Chan

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 29, 1982 Southwark, London, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actress and producer
Known for	Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Raya and the Last Dragon, Captain Marvel
Awards	Women In Film Max Mara Face of the Future

There is a version of Gemma Chan that the film industry finds easy to sell. She is the composed figure in the frame, the woman whose stillness reads as control: the synthetic housekeeper learning to feel in Humans, the heiress who seems to have everything in Crazy Rich Asians, the immortal at the centre of Eternals. Yet her best work happens where the composure gives way, and the project she has carried longest, a modest thriller called Josephine, asks her to play a mother who cannot shield her daughter from what the girl has seen.

Before any of that, she had a different life lined up. Chan read law at Worcester College, Oxford, and was offered a training contract at Slaughter and May, one of the most prestigious firms in the City of London. She turned it down to train at Drama Centre London — obvious in hindsight, reckless at the time for a young British actress of Chinese descent with few visible precedents.

The family story behind her is a migrant one. Her father, an engineer, grew up in Hong Kong; her mother, a pharmacist, was raised in Greenock, Scotland, after her own parents left Hong Kong. Chan arrived on 29 November 1982 at Guy’s Hospital in Southwark, grew up in suburban Locksbottom, in the London borough of Bromley, went to Newstead Wood School and still speaks some basic Cantonese.

The early credits were a standard British apprenticeship. She made her professional debut in the horror miniseries When Evil Calls in 2006, modelled on the first series of the reality show Project Catwalk, played a geologist in the Doctor Who special “The Waters of Mars” in 2009 and appeared that year in the psychological thriller Exam. In 2010 came Richard Ayoade’s Submarine and an episode of Sherlock, “The Blind Banker”, in which she played Soo Lin Yao, a heavily accented Chinese immigrant in a story later criticised for its orientalist clichés.

The stage gave her what television rarely did. She appeared in the British premiere of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, a play about race and casting, and returned for its revival at the National Theatre in 2014; promoting it, she spoke openly about how hard it was to be considered for parts that were not written as Chinese, or for period drama at all. In 2015 she played Ruth in Jamie Lloyd’s West End revival of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, and Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian that she showed, “with great skill”, a “coolly inscrutable Ruth”.

That same year began the role that changed her standing. In Humans, the Channel 4 and AMC series that ran until 2018, she played Anita, later Mia, a domestic synth slowly discovering an inner life, and The A.V. Club wrote that she “anchors the series”. In 2018 she made two films that argued with each other. In Crazy Rich Asians she was asked to play the lead and chose Astrid instead, the cousin whose flawless surface hides a failing marriage; the film became the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the decade. In Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots she played Bess of Hardwick, a noblewoman history records as white, and when online trolls objected she replied: “If John Wayne can play Genghis Khan, I can play Bess of Hardwick.”

Hollywood’s largest studios followed. She sat through four hours of prosthetic make-up to become Minn-Erva, a Kree sniper, in Captain Marvel in 2019, played a literary agent opposite Meryl Streep in Steven Soderbergh‘s Let Them All Talk, voiced the rival warrior Namaari in Disney‘s Raya and the Last Dragon and, in 2021, led Chloé Zhao’s Eternals as Sersi.

Eternals is where the clean story of her ascent gets complicated. It handed her the centre of a Marvel film, yet it became the first Marvel Studios release to score below the “fresh” line on Rotten Tomatoes, and Sersi, a character built on restraint, gave her little beyond holding an overcrowded ensemble together. The same year brought a misstep closer to her own name. Hold Still, Vincent, a podcast she briefly produced about the 1982 killing of Vincent Chin, was pulled from distribution after it emerged that the production company had not consulted Chin’s estate. For an actress who had made representation part of her public voice, launching the #StopESEAHate campaign against anti-Asian hate crimes that May, it was an uncomfortable lesson that telling a community’s story requires that community’s consent. The studio work that followed, in Olivia Wilde‘s Don’t Worry Darling and Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, kept her visible without giving her much to play.

Which is why Josephine matters. Chan was cast by the writer-director Beth de Araújo in 2019, the pandemic stalled the project, and the film was finally shot in San Francisco from April 2024, with Channing Tatum as her husband and the newcomer Mason Reeves as the eight-year-old daughter who witnesses a brutal assault in Golden Gate Park. Chan is also one of its producers. At the Sundance Film Festival in January 2026 it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award in the US dramatic competition, and in February it played in competition at the Berlinale. Her Claire has none of Astrid’s armour: she is a parent trying to keep fear out of a child’s life, with no guarantee that she can.

Television has meanwhile offered lighter work. In Peacock’s The Five Star Weekend, the Elin Hilderbrand adaptation that premiered in July 2026, she plays Gigi Ling, an airline pilot who joins Jennifer Garner‘s grieving food influencer on Nantucket after the two meet online; Peacock renewed the series for a second season in August. Her longest-standing ambition remains in development: a biopic of Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese American movie star, which she is set to lead and produce with Nina Yang Bongiovi and Working Title, from a script by David Henry Hwang, the playwright whose Yellow Face she performed more than a decade ago. “We have a script,” she said this year.

Away from the set, Chan has been a UNICEF UK ambassador since 2021, and she shares a home in London with the actor Dominic Cooper, her partner since 2018. On the Crazy Rich Asians press tour she turned the attention her red-carpet looks attract into a platform, wearing Asian designers at every stop.

Josephine opens in cinemas in the United States and the United Kingdom on 20 November 2026. It is the film she waited longest for, and it will show whether an industry that built her career on composure is ready to follow her somewhere less polished.

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