Michelle Yeoh names her favourite movies of all time
Although Michelle Yeoh rose to fame in the late 1990s after starring in Tomorrow Never Dies and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, she has recently celebrated a career resurgence following roles in Star Trek: Discovery and Everything Everywhere All At Once. The latter has received ten Academy Award nominations, including a ‘Best Actress’ nod for Yeoh. Her performance has been critically lauded, with many people believing it to be the best role of her career thus far.
However, in the 1990s, Yeoh struggled to find work that didn’t “stereotype” her, she told People. “At that point, people in the industry couldn’t really tell the difference between whether I was Chinese or Japanese or Korean or if I even spoke English. They would talk very loudly and very slow.” With her role in Tomorrow Never Dies, Yeoh moved away from the Hong Kong action and martial arts films she was known for starring in and began working in Hollywood. However, Yeoh explained, “I didn’t work for almost two years, until Crouching Tiger, simply because I could not agree with the stereotypical roles that were put forward to me.”
Since then, Yeoh has starred in various action and martial arts films, although none have been as successful as Everything Everywhere All At Once. Talking to The Wrap, the film’s directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, discussed the brilliance of Yeoh. Scheinert said: “While we were shooting, we started to reflect on how the whole movie was becoming this opportunity to show that all these Asian actors have so much more to offer than Hollywood has been giving them. Michelle has a crazy résumé, but she was getting to show new sides of herself.”
Following the success of Everything Everywhere All At Once, Yeoh is bound to be gracing our screens much more frequently. For now, she has been doing plenty of promotion for the film alongside her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis. The pair sat down with Letterboxd to share their top four favourite movies. Yeoh began with The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal epic crime drama. Although she didn’t elaborate on why the film is one of her favourites, its status as one of the greatest movies ever made speaks for itself.
However, she discussed her love for Victor Fleming’s Technicolour classic The Wizard of Oz, stating, “I love dance. I love the magic of cinema… I was a kid. It’s one of my favourite films.”
Yeoh’s final two picks were her own movies, beginning with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film, directed by Ang Lee, was released in 2000 and starred Yeoh as warrior Yu Shu Lien, the owner of a private security company. The movie’s success, winning an Academy Award for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’, led to the popularity of Chinese wuxia films in Hollywood. Yeoh picked it as one of her favourites “for all the best reasons.” She explained that it has “the most amazing story about martial arts. It’s so us. So inherently part of our culture that we could share with the rest of the world.”
Finally, she picked Everything Everywhere All At Once, exclaiming, “What is there not to love about this crazy, insanely amazing ride that everyone has to see at least twice or three times?” The film follows Yeoh’s character Evelyn, a middle-aged laundromat owner who is unhappy with her life. However, she takes on different versions of herself in a multiverse as she deals with complex issues of identity, motherhood and human connection. Upon its release, it grossed $107million worldwide, making it A24’s most successful film.
Watch the full clip below.
Michelle Yeoh’s favourite films:
- The Wizard of Oz
- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
- The Godfather
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
