The grand dame of martial arts movies, Michelle Yeoh, spills the tea on her long and storied career as an actor in a recent interview, including the time when she was nearly killed while performing a stunt with fellow superstar Jackie Chan in 1992’s Supercop.
Yeoh, who stars in the upcoming movie Everything Everywhere All at Once along with Hollywood great Jamie Lee Curtis, appeared in a Feb 14 interview in Entertainment Weekly (EW).
Curtis was all praises for her co-star, saying, “I learned a lot. She is the master, I am the student. She taught me that it’s not how hard I punch, it’s how she receives the punch that is the art form, which really sells the magic.”
She went on to describe the film, which opens March 25, as “This is a bow-down-and-kiss-Michelle-Yeoh’s-f—ing-feet movie.”
We can’t wait.
Indeed, the actor has gone from strength to strength in the past four decades, from Supercop to the epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to 2018’s blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians.
Last year, Yeoh gained a new generation of fans when she appeared in Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
The woman clearly has staying power, and we’re so glad that she didn’t get killed way back in ’92.
Yeoh told EW this is how things went down: “In Asia at that time, we don’t really do rehearsals; we don’t have weeks of preparation. We learn the stunt, and we do it.”
The stunt in question called for Yeoh to jump from a truck onto the hood of a convertible Chan was driving at top speed on a highway.
Unmoving, it was about a six-foot leap, which Yeoh, who had trained as a ballet dancer and had several action films under her belt at that point, felt was doable.
“But once the two cars are moving, you go, oh, wow, this is a completely different experience,” she went on to say.
“I’m not standing still, the car isn’t, nothing is still. I don’t know whether it was crazy, a moment of insanity, [but] the thought that went through my head was, you’re never going to know how it feels until you try it.”
So off she went. And the first time she tried the stunt, she landed on the convertible’s hood.
And then fell off, almost getting hit by two cars that were following.
She told EW, ”The windscreen was supposed to shatter, and that would have helped me have a break. But the windscreen didn’t shatter, I had nowhere to hold onto, and I kept sliding off the car. All I remember was like ‘Duhn!’ on the ground. Fortunately, I didn’t go head first.”
Fortunately, Jackie Chan intervened. Yeoh said, “Then I hear Jackie. He was like, ‘Okay, okay, that’s it! Enough! We are finished for the day! We’re not doing anymore! This is stupid! This is ridiculous! We’re not doing it!’”
Except that, being the bada*** that she is, she tried the stunt again and nailed it.
“When you fall off a horse, you jump back, right on, right away. So we went up and got it in the next take.”
Auteur Quentin Tarantino went on to describe Supercop as having “the greatest stunts ever filmed in any movie ever.”
Chan and Yeoh go way back, as this 1984 watch ad shows.
Yeoh said that when she first told Hong Kong-based production company D&B Films that she wanted to do action films, “They looked at me like I had gone a little cuckoo.”
“The action movies in Hong Kong at that time were really real. There is no green screen; there are no cables. Everything is physical; everything is contact. That was the period of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Jet Li. I mean, Jackie, Jet, Sammo, they all have scars they can show you to tell you how their movies were made.”
And as for her, “I didn’t want to just play the damsel in distress. I felt that the girls were not given the right exposure or the proper respect. Women don’t have to sit back and wait to be rescued.”
Legendary. /TISG
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