“Your loss, my bro”: the old friend who handed Michelle Yeoh an Oscar-winning performance
Thrust right back into the global limelight in 2022 with Everything Everywhere All at Once, Michelle Yeoh cannot be stopped. The Academy Award-winner for Best Actress made a formidable comeback into action, albeit combined with comedy, but Yeoh actually has a very famous fellow actor to thank for turning down a starring role in the indie-turned-blockbuster.
Everything Everywhere All at Once follows Yeoh’s character Evelyn whilst her laundromat teeters on the brink of failure, and her marriage to wimpy husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is on the rocks. Overworked, Evelyn Wang, struggles to cope with everything, including a tattered relationship with her judgmental father and daughter.
As if facing a gloomy midlife crisis wasn’t enough, Evelyn must brace herself up for an unpleasant meeting with an impersonal bureaucrat: Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), the shabbily dressed IRS auditor. As the stern agent loses patience, an inexplicable multiverse rift becomes an eye-opening exploration of parallel realities.
The film battles with family relationships, immigration and, ultimately, Evelyn’s inner power, made all the more stark by the dynamic between her and her husband. Directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (the Daniels) have previously admitted that if Yeoh had turned down the part of Evelyn, they would have had to start from scratch.
The Daniels also admit, however, that their original idea was to make the husband the protagonist and to cast Jackie Chan, with Yeoh playing his wife. When Chan was unavailable, “something clicked”, the Daniels say, and they realised the story would work much better with the wife as the lead.
Chan and Yeoh are in fact old friends – he was Yeoh’s first co-star, in a 1984 commercial for a Hong Kong watch brand. There has always been a competitive element to their relationship, it seems, and Yeoh told The Guardian: “Jackie actually texted me […] And he says: ‘Wow, I hear amazing things about your movie. Did you know that the boys came to see me in China?’ And I said: ‘Yes, your loss, my bro!’”
Yeoh and Chan co-starred in several films after their chance meeting in 1984, with Yeoh going into the Hong Kong film industry after winning Miss Malaysia in 1983. Her dance training made her the perfect candidate to star in action movies just like the men, and the rest is history. She starred alongside Chan in his action comedy Police Story 3: Supercop, and Yeoh featured in the likes of Memoirs of a Geisha and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, bolstering her position as an action hero.
With Chan as a friend, we can understand how Yeoh got so far, but a huge portion of it should be credited to her trailblazing attitude and talent. It’s something that is now being recognised not only in genre-specific realms but across the entire filmmaking globe.
