This week, Gemma Chan has been enjoying some of the best buzz of her career, for her titular role in Channel 4’s I Am Hannah. It is the kind of work that Chan is especially brilliant in – intimate and intriguing in tone, and nestled squarely in television’s prime time. But is it the sort of work she would have always got?

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For the September issue of Vogue, Chan – a 36-year-old Oxford-educated, Drama Centre-trained actress from Kent – is celebrated among the magazine’s 15 game-changing cover stars for a career that has layered talent with moving the needle on race representation on screen. From the important visibility of her early work in middle England’s TV touchstones, such as Doctor Who and Sherlock, to her breakout role as android Anita/Mia in Humans, to a past year that has seen her explode into Hollywood by dint of major hit films Captain Marvel and Crazy Rich Asians (the highest grossing romantic comedy of the past 10 years), hers has been a paradigm shifting ride.

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“One of the most satisfying moments in my professional life was taking my mum and dad to the Crazy Rich Asians premiere in London,” she recalls of the hit comedy’s launch last September. “We all watched it together and were in tears. It was a very emotional, cathartic experience. My mum said she never expected a film like that to get made by Hollywood, one where you could see people like our family up on screen.”

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In January, Chan took the role of Bess of Hardwick in director Josie Rourke’s film Mary Queen of Scots, proving how antiquated our notions about race and history can be in art. Yet for all its positive strides recently, she points out that her industry’s work is far from done. “I know the perception is that it’s got a lot easier to make films by or about minorities or women, but it’s actually still difficult. I would like to see a real increase in the diversity of people who are in a position to make decisions,” she tells Vogue.

"I would like to see a real increase in the diversity of people who are in a position to make decisions in the industry." © Peter Lindbergh

“When you think about who actually has the power to get a project green-lit, it is just a handful of people in Hollywood, and even fewer of those are women, or people of colour or other minorities,” she says. “Until we address those systemic imbalances all the way up the chain, we’ve still got a lot of work to do.”

The September issue of British Vogue co-edited by HRH The Duchess of Sussex is available for digital download now on App Store and for Android, and on newsstands on Friday, 2 August.

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