How a fight with Michelle Yeoh challenged Jackie Chan’s misogyny: “I kicked his butt”
Before Michelle Yeoh, it’s said that Jackie Chan believed a woman’s place was in the kitchen. According to the revered actress and martial arts expert, that all changed after she beat him in a fight on the set of a movie they were both starring in. Born in Malaysia in 1962, Yeoh rose to fame in the 1990s thanks to her involvement with a string of highly successful Hong Kong action films. She is a martial art movie mainstay, having starred in everything from Yes, Madam to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. She also starred in Tomorrow Never Dies and Memoirs of A Geisha. Who better, then, to kick Chan’s butt and teach him a thing or two in the process?
Yeoh met Jackie Chan on the set of a television commercial in the mid-1980s. She’s spent her early life determined to forge a career as a ballet dancer. However, after a back injury, she was forced to choose another path. After establishing herself in the world of acting, she ran into Chan once again on the set of the 1992 film Supercop, in which she plays the second lead, the director of Interpol. She was already famous for doing her own stunts and didn’t hesitate to bring her furious energy to the set of Supercop, in which, at one point, she jumps off a motorbike into a moving train. Rather you than me, Michelle. Rather you than me.
Shortly before the release of Shang-Chi in 2021, Yeoh sat down for an interview with The Guardian in which she recalled her experience of working with Chan on Supercop. Chan, like the buff male stuntmen who frequented the Hong Hong gym she used to train in the 1980s, didn’t necessarily believe Yeoh was quite as fearsome as everyone made out.
The actor has since admitted that he hasn’t always treated his female colleagues with the respect they deserved, that is until Yeoh came along. During her interview, the actress recalled that Chan once begged her not to perform all those insane stunts: “I told him, ‘You’re a fine one to ask me to stop! You’re always doing them.’ He said, ‘That’s because when you do one, I have to go one better.’ The pressure was on him, poor dude.”
When asked if Chan believes women don’t belong on movie sets, Yeoh replied: “He used to. Until I kicked his butt.”
