Best quotes by Gemma Chan

Gemma Chan

Gemma Chan

English actress

Gemma Chan (born 29 November 1982) is an English actress. Born and raised in London, Chan attended the Newstead Wood School for Girls and studied law at Worcester College, Oxford before choosing to pursue a career in acting instead, enrolling at the Drama Centre London. Chan was subsequently cast in various supporting roles on television, including Doctor Who, Sherlock, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Fresh Meat, Bedlam and True Love. She also appeared in independent films Exam (2009), Submarine (2010) and Belles Familles (2015). Chan performed in the British premiere of Yellow Face at The Park Theatre and Our Ajax at the Southwark Playhouse.

Chan had minor roles in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) and Transformers: The Last Knight (2017). She starred as a servile anthropomorph in sci-fi series Humans (2015–2018) to critical praise. Chan gained widespread recognition for portraying Astrid Leong-Teo in Jon M. Chu's romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians (2018), which became a critical and commercial hit. Chan along with the ensemble was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture. Chan played Bess of Hardwick in the historical drama Mary Queen of Scots (2018) and voiced the antagonist Namaari in Disney's animated film Raya and the Last Dragon (2021). In Marvel Studios' Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Chan portrayed Minn-Erva in Captain Marvel (2019) before headlining Eternals (2021) as Sersi.

All quotes by Gemma Chan:

If you find something you are passionate about, you've got to try. Even if something doesn't quite work out, disappointment is a temporary thing. Regret lasts forever.

If we just create and don't think about what might happen, that's when we're going to get into trouble.

At one point I wanted to work for NASA and be an astrophysicist, so I did physics, math, and chemistry before realizing I probably wasn't quite smart enough to do that. But I am still hugely interested in cosmology and astrophysics. That is my geeky subject area.

Making a pretty picture, an image, is a completely different thing from acting to camera.

I haven't always wanted to be an actor, no. I wasn't one of the little kids that was desperate to be an actor. I did a lot of drama and a lot of music, but it was just something for fun on the side. I was quite shy as a kid and I found a lot of freedom in performing. I never knew you could do it as a job.

I think we have a tendency to support the underdogs.

Even though I don't necessarily believe in everything that's supernatural, I like being scared and I like things that are suspenseful.

My parents are wonderful, practical, sensible people, and the expectation was that I would study something academic.

I'm quite a rational person. I'm not very superstitious, but I really do enjoy horror as a genre.

Our whole economy and society is already being changed by the fact that we have increasing unemployment, mass unemployment and that's what we're facing in the future because of increasing automation.

In the past, we've always come up with new jobs for humans to do and so it's always benefitted us, technological progress, but now we're not really creating enough new jobs to replace the jobs that are being automated.

I ended up doing a local AmDram musical when I was nine or so. We had to sing and dance and act. It was probably terrible, but I loved it.