She came to global prominence for her role as Rose Tico in the Star Wars sequel trilogy films The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019).

[10] Tran attended Westview High School in San Diego[11] and worked at a yogurt shop to earn money for head shots.

[16] When she went to shoot her scenes in England in early 2016, she was required to keep her role secret, so she told her family she was making an independent film in Canada.

[25] Tran is also an executive producer of the spoken-word poetry ensemble film Summertime, marking her second collaboration with Raya and the Last Dragon director Carlos López Estrada.

[26] Tran and Estrada announced that they were establishing a new production company called Antigravity Academy in November 2022, intending to help produce entertainment from and about people from historically excluded communities.

[30] After the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi in December 2017, Tran became the subject of racist and sexist attacks over the Internet[31][32][33] and on Twitter,[34][35] including insults about her ethnicity and size.

[36] Her character Rose Tico's entry on Wookieepedia, an online encyclopedia about the Star Wars universe, was edited by internet trolls to include racist and vulgar comments; Fandom, the wiki hosting service that operated the domain, removed the offensive edits, protected the page, and publicly condemned the vandalism.

[41] Subsequently, several cast and crew members of The Last Jedi condemned the attacks and spoke out in defense of Tran, including writer-director Rian Johnson[42] and actors John Boyega,[43][44][45] Domhnall Gleeson,[46][47] and Mark Hamill.

[39][40][48][49] Other celebrities voiced support for Tran as well, including Stephen Colbert, Josh Gad, Kumail Nanjiani, Gabrielle Union, Elijah Wood, and Edgar Wright.

[31][2][52] She wrote that the attacks had reinforced the ones she had long faced as a Vietnamese-American,[43][52] and that the ordeal reached a point where she began to believe the negative remarks about her, stating that they had sent her "down a spiral of self-hate, into the darkest recesses of my mind, places where I tore myself apart, where I put their words above my own self-worth.