The one genre Michelle Yeoh wants nothing to do with: “I do not partake in the making of them”
You know you’re doing something right as an actor when, in a single day, it’s announced that not only have you won the honorary ‘Golden Bear’ at the Berlin Film Festival, following in the footsteps of Paul Thomas Anderson and John Cassavetes, but that you’ll soon be getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and Michelle Yeoh knows that well.
Despite Variety’s announcement post managing to make it seem like she had shuffled off this mortal coil by using a black and white photo, Yeoh is actually alive and well and has evidently moved into the category of actor that when you see them on screen in a film you can pretty much sit back and think ‘OK, this will probably be very good’.
That was definitely the case with the dizzying, genre mash-up Everything, Everywhere All At Once back in 2022, the film which won her an Oscar for her role as the no-nonsense, kung-fu kicking, multiverse-shifting Evelyn Quan Wang while sweeping the board otherwise, picking up ‘Best Picture’ among a host of others.
But it was by far Yeoh’s first acclaimed performance, the actor who started off in the 1980s in her native Malaysia, making martial arts movies and found fame thanks to her sultry but evidently very deadly role in 1997’s James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies opposite Pierce Brosnan. While that was something of a secondary part, there was nothing secondary about her first real lead, which came three years later in the jaw-dropping Ang Lee film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Made on a budget of $17million, the film was a huge global hit with critics and audiences, earning $214m at the box office and hauling in ten Academy Award nominations, with Yeoh herself nominated for a Bafta. One of the finest martial arts films this century, it became the first foreign language title to ever break the $100m barrier for revenue in the US.
Despite becoming a worldwide star thanks to the film, the actor stepped back to some degree and began to pick and choose her films carefully, making just five in the following six years before she signed on to Danny Boyle’s sci-fi Sunshine in 2007. It was a new genre for Yeoh, who had only specialised in martial arts movies alongside drama like Memoirs of a Geisha in 2005.
Dipping into most bases, she has since gone on to appear in more superhero movies, including Guardians of the Galaxy and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, as well as in action with Jason Statham’s Mechanic: Resurrection and, most recently, covered musicals with the two Wicked adaptations, but admittedly, there’s no chance of spotting her in anything very scary soon.
She revealed to Huffington Post UK, “There’s only one genre that I wouldn’t do, and it deals with the supernatural. I love horror films, but I do not partake in the making of them. As a Buddhist, we have a philosophy: if you walk into their realm, they are open to walk into yours.”
That train of thought, of course, rules her out of dealing with any vampires, seeing as they have to be invited in before they can start chomping on necks and drain you for dinner, but Yeoh obviously isn’t squeamish given she’s signed up to do a film called The Surgeon which revolves around a retired surgeon forced to operate on a mystery patient.
She’s also not going to be short of a penny or two in her bank account because she is in line to continue to appear in some of the biggest movie franchises around. Aside from a role on the fourth and fifth instalments of James Cameron’s seemingly never-ending giant blue people nonsense Avatar, she’ll also be appearing in a TV spin-off of Blade Runner, titled Blade Runner 2099, set 50 years after the last film starring Ryan Gosling and should hit streaming sites later this year.
