The comeback queen: actor Joan Chen on self-doubt, success, savagings – and a second chance at 63

Joan Chen is talking about her busier-than-ever work schedule, her face lit up with excitement, when she mentions being “in the winter of my career”. After decades in the film industry, she sees this as the final chapter. But the Chinese American actor never expected there could be new beginnings, too: at 63, she has been earning glowing reviews for her moving performance in the indie film Dìdi (弟弟) .

After her breakout role in 1987’s sumptuous historical epic The Last Emperor , Chen became a huge star in the 90s, until she got tired of being typecast as the exotic, seductive temptress and started making her own films. She has continued to work quietly and consistently as an actor and director, in Hollywood and China, but now appears on the brink of a career renaissance. Last year, Chen appeared in Disney+’s critically acclaimed mystery A Murder at the End of the World , and we speak while she is in Atlanta shooting Oh. What. Fun. , a festive film with an all-star cast led by Michelle Pfeiffer. With Dìdi, a hilarious and touching immigrant coming-of-age story, she is firmly back in the Hollywood conversation.

Even so, Chen had second thoughts about taking the role. When director Sean Wang approached her about playing Chungsing, the mother of a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy (played by Izaac Wang) who has a transformative summer shooting skateboarding videos, she was concerned she was too old for the part. “The most important thing, when you walk into a theatre, is that you believe that person is that person. Sean was very enthusiastic about me being a part of the film, but I was hesitant. He said: ‘I know there won’t be a problem.’ He was right. You just imbue the character with humanity and complexity, and no one even thinks about that other thing.”

It helps, of course, that Chen looks far younger than her years, but her casting makes a change from seeing actors barely out of their 20s in the role of a mother to older children. She also welcomed the chance to play against the stereotype of older Asian women as tough “tiger mothers” who care only about their children achieving good grades and getting into good universities. She references The Joy Luck Club and Crazy Rich Asians , films which feature Asian mothers who are “very strict and lacking emotion and domineering. Chungsing is different. Actually, she is like many immigrant mums that I know.”

Related: ‘In all those movies about childhood, I never saw someone who looked like me’: Sean Wang on his debut, Dìdi

Chen, who lives in San Francisco, married her second husband, Peter Hui, a cardiologist, in 1992. She has two daughters, Audrey and Angela. She slowed down after having them, she says, but made sure not to stop working completely. “I didn’t want to be unfulfilled, just for the sake of staying at home. So I did leave, now and then, taking jobs. But that obviously took a toll on the family and the kids. I have regrets on both ends. You can’t have it all. You only have 24 hours in a day; you sacrifice this or that, and it’s part of life. I just wish I had been a calmer mum to my children.”

Chen’s own parents were doctors, and she has an older brother, Chase. Born in Shanghai, she grew up during China’s brutal Cultural Revolution , launched by the communist leader Mao Zedong, in which between 500,000 and 2 million people died in a series of mass killings. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, was said to have “discovered” Chen while Chen was shooting on her school’s rifle range – but it was actually Cheng Yin, the director of Jinggang Mountain, a film Jiang was producing, who Chen says first spotted her when she was 14.

When Jiang was arrested in 1976 for her part in the Cultural Revolution and sentenced to life imprisonment, Jinggang Mountain – and Chen’s first acting role – fell apart. “I was so relieved because there was a scene where I had to cry,” she says. “I was practising every day and I couldn’t cry. But at the same time [I was] so disappointed that I had to go back to school. This had been a lot more fun.” Fortunately, her acting dreams were salvaged when she won a place on an actor’s training programme at the Shanghai Film Studio in 1975.

Becoming an actor meant Chen escaped the practice of being “sent down” to do manual labour in remote rural areas, as was common for privileged or educated young people during the Cultural Revolution. An estimated 17 million children were separated from their families during this time and Chen says she felt a sense of survivor’s guilt having avoided such a fate. It drove her to make her first film as a director, 1998’s Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl , which focused on the “down to the countryside” movement. “I felt that I was one of the chosen few from my generation to have had such a lucky break,” she says. “Growing up, as far back as I could remember, my parents were thinking of ways for us to stay in Shanghai.”

Even so, her family was not left unscathed by the harsh realities of the Cultural Revolution. When she was six, her grandfather killed himself after he was wrongly accused of being a counter-revolutionary and a spy. “That was the first time that I saw adults cry,” she says. “My mother cried, and my grandmother cried. That was very scary for me.”

By the time she was 18, Chen was one of China’s biggest movie stars after the release of Little Flower and Hearts for the Motherland , both fervently patriotic dramas released in 1979; the latter included a scene in which Chen belted out the (still incredibly popular) song I Love You, China. But in 1981, aged 20, she decided to move to the US to study film-making at California State University, Northridge.

At the time, there were so few Asian actors in Hollywood that it never occurred to Chen that she could continue her acting career in the US. Instead, she supported herself during her studies by working in a restaurant. “I had a schoolmate who was a stuntwoman. She said: ‘I can’t believe you, having been the best actress in China [she was awarded the country’s prestigious Hundred Flowers award for best actress for her performance in Little Flower], work in a restaurant. You have to try to work in Hollywood, it pays so much better.’”

Chen signed up with an agency that specialised in representing Asian actors. Her big break came in Bernardo Bertolucci ’s The Last Emperor, an opulent drama about the life of Puyi, China’s final reigning monarch. Chen gives a captivating performance as Empress Wanrong, Puyi’s opium-addicted wife, who is hopelessly miserable in her gilded cage. The film won nine Oscars in 1988, including best picture. Roles followed in Oliver Stone’s war drama Heaven & Earth, as the mother of a peasant girl, and David Lynch’s surreal cult classic Twin Peaks, where she plays a factory owner turned into a drawer knob (yes, a drawer knob).

But afterwards, Chen says she still struggled to find decent roles. “People were not writing for Asian Americans. There were not enough Asian film-makers, not enough Asian script writers. People didn’t know how to use me. Even when they wanted to use me, they didn’t know what story to put me in. There was such a poverty of material. If it were today, then I know there would be many parts, but it was a different era.”

Chen’s striking looks have, however, been noted throughout her career. She was named one of the “50 Most Beautiful People” by People magazine in 1992, and a Time magazine profile in 1999 said she had “the most luscious mouth on either side of the Pacific”. Did she ever feel objectified? “That wasn’t bothering me back then. What bothered me most was that I was somehow inadequate. I was not beautiful enough. I was not smart enough. I felt like a knockoff, not a real product. If people praised me, I felt as if I had fooled them.” She ponders whether this “deep insecurity” bubbled up because of the pressures of her career. “It’s a double-edged sword,” she says, “because then you work harder.”

Dismayed by the lack of good roles in Hollywood, Chen made the move into directing in her 30s. “I felt my career wasn’t going anywhere. The parts were getting narrower and narrower; just evil women, dragon lady or whatever, uninteresting.” Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, which she wrote and directed, was well-received by critics but her second project, Autumn in New York , an age-gap romance starring Richard Gere and Winona Ryder, was universally savaged. Chen says her version was recut by the film’s distributor, MGM.

“There were five producers, they had a big monitor,” says Chen. “My monitor was much smaller. Sometimes they watched ballgames on it. I felt threatened and when I felt threatened, I became combative. Then I would say no to each of their suggestions and it became a little unpleasant at times. Looking back, I could have negotiated much better.” She is careful to point out that it was a significant achievement for her to be hired to direct in the first place. “I mean, someone who was an immigrant, who didn’t even grow up in the United States – it felt, to me, like such a breakthrough.” Would she make another Hollywood studio film? “Possibly, now, with more maturity,” she says.

For now, Chen is enjoying the new lease of life she’s experiencing in her career. She’s just finished shooting the remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 romcom The Wedding Banquet , and there are whispers that she may be nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Dìdi. “The opportunities that I have now, at my age, compared to right after The Last Emperor, seem more plentiful,” she says, delight etched on her face. “I’m thrilled. I’m really excited that times are different. We should not take it for granted.”

During the hard times, Chen often thought about getting a “real profession”, mulling over alternative careers as a nutritionist or lawyer, or the manager of a care home – but the magnetic pull of acting was always too strong. “It wasn’t easy,” she admits. “But even though parts were few and far between, I had a great time. I love acting. It is a necessity. A small part, a part that’s bad, whatever; I just took it. I did the best I could. And I found out that supporting parts are a lot more challenging to do than a lead part because you can’t waste one second of your screen time.Looking back, it’s really all part of my journey.”

Related: Dìdi review – impressive Asian-American teen-angst drama takes the unconventional route

During the pandemic, Chen’s mother was sick with cancer and the actor would fly back and forth between the US and China to see her. She was quarantined on five occasions, for three weeks at a time, and started writing columns for a literary magazine that would go on to become a book called Mao Yu (the Chinese characters for cat and fish), which has just been released in China, where it’s been well-received.

“The only thing that gives me true joy is to create,” says Chen, reflecting on what kept her going during those long hours cooped up alone in her hotel room. “To stay creative is my life force. You know, the quarantine, you’re caged in that little room but my mind was free. So I know that is the key – everything else is really not as meaningful.”

• Dìdi (弟弟) is in UK cinemas from 2 August.