Gemma Chan: Anna May Wong Biopic Has a Script
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Gemma Chan told the Associated Press the Anna May Wong biopic has a script, with Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang adapting Graham Russell Gao Hodges' 2012 biography Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend, adding "hopefully more soon."
- Working Title Films, with co-chairs Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner and producer Nina Yang Bongiovi, has the project in development, with Wong's niece Anna Wong attached as a consultant.
- Chan said Wong "never properly got her due" and framed her story as resonating today because Wong wrestled with "who gets to call this place home" and "who gets to be American."
- Chan was announced to star and executive produce the biopic in March 2022, when the project was first publicly unveiled.
- Deadline separately reported that Xin Zhilei will portray Wong in a competing biopic titled Sunset Boulevard – The Anna May Wong Story, from Fundamental Films.
- Anna May Wong was Hollywood's first Chinese-American movie star, born January 3, 1905 and dying February 3, 1961 after a career spanning silent films and talkies including Shanghai Express opposite Marlene Dietrich.
Why it matters: The biopic has a script but is still in development more than three years after its March 2022 announcement, leaving the timeline uncertain — and a competing Wong biopic from Fundamental Films starring Xin Zhilei is now also in the mix, putting two actresses on parallel tracks to portray the same trailblazing figure.
![‘Star City’ Finale: Creators Explain Why They Couldn’t Resist Rewriting Their Own Alt-Space History by Going to Venus and Killing Off [SPOILER]](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/StarCity-finale-MAIN.jpg)
