Oscar Winner Youn Yuh-jung on How LGBTQ+ Comedy The Wedding Banquet Mirrors Her Real Life: ‘My Personal Story’ (Exclusive)

The words “queer” and “comedy” don’t immediately come to mind when audiences think of Youn Yuh-jung’s films.

The Oscar winner’s latest project, The Wedding Banquet (a reimagining of the 1993 Ang Lee film of the same name) is both of those things.

The Andrew Ahn-directed film centers around two gay couples — Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-Chan) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) — who are faced with challenges that may uproot their relationships.

Angela and Lee have been unlucky with their IVF treatments and cannot afford to pay for another round. Min is closeted and his student visa is expiring soon. When his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chris rejects his proposal, Min makes the offer to Angela instead: a green card marriage in exchange for funding Lee’s IVF.

To access his family’s wealth, Min and Angela need to convince his grandmother Ja-Young (Youn) that they’re in love. The astute matriarch sees through the charade, but insists on holding a traditional wedding banquet so the Korean media — and Min’s overseas grandfather — will believe their marriage is real.

“I thought I was very serious during the scenes,” Youn told PEOPLE with a smile and chuckle. “I was playing my role very seriously.”

One of The Wedding Banquet’s most powerful scenes is when Ja-Young and Min have an honest, one-on-one conversation about his sexuality. It’s an experience Youn says she had with her own son.

“My personal life story is very involved with this movie,” she explained. “Korea is a very conservative country. People never come out as gay, publicly or in front of their parents. But my first son happened to be [a] gay person, so I shared my experience between him and me and in the movie with my grandchild and me.”

“So we share this, my personal story with Andrew,” she said of Ahn, who also cowrote the screenplay. “It is real, because [the conversation] between my son and [I is] actually in that movie.”

Despite her star power, Youn isn’t sure of how — or even if — The Wedding Banquet will be received in her home country.

“I hope that Korea will open their minds or wake up,” she said.

“I hope that this film will be able to show,” chimed in Joan Chen, who plays Angela’s mother May.

“I don’t know,” Youn replied. “Still don’t know.”

Ahn told PEOPLE how the current socio political climate in the U.S. and abroad affected the direction of the film.

“I think for me, it feels only kind of responsible to show a path towards hope,” said Ahn, who identifies as LGBTQ+. “I wanted there to be this optimism, because I think that the world is so dark and it’s a really difficult place, and I didn’t feel like beating someone while they’re down.”

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“And so for me, that’s my philosophy in the filmmaking, and that’s something that I really adopted from the original film, which has this message of hope and possibility,” he continued. “I wanted to show our resilience and hopefully inspire people to go through some of these difficult times,” 

The Wedding Banquet opens in theaters Friday, April 18, with tickets available here.