“She’s shattered and she’s in pain”: Yeo Yann Yann on playing a villain and terrorising Tom Hardy in ‘Havoc’
The Raid director Gareth Evans‘ latest movie, Havoc, has been a long time coming. Principal photography on the Netflix action flick started in the summer of 2021, but due to planned reshoots, scheduling commitments, and the actors’ and writers’ strikes, the film didn’t premiere until April 25th, 2025.
Tom Hardy leads the cast as Walker, who needs to battle his way through the criminal underworld of an unnamed American city to try and save the life of Justin Cornwell’s Charlie, the son of Forest Whitaker’s corrupt and powerful politician, Lawrence Beaumont.
It doesn’t sound easy, but matters are further complicated by Walker’s colleagues causing even more… well, havoc, by lighting the fuse on a citywide blood feud when their illicit ways see them gun down Jeremy Ang Jones’ drug kingpin Sui and frame Charlie as the suspect, which causes his grieving – and dangerous – mother, played by Yeo Yann Yann, to fly in with vengeance on her mind.
Yann wasn’t involved in the reshoots, and after moving on to play different characters in different projects, she found it jarring to revisit herself as the formidable crime boss. “Yeah,” she admitted. “I don’t even recognise myself now.”
Before she’d even met Evans, two casting directors, one in the United Kingdom and the other in Hong Kong, mentioned her name separately to the filmmaker as someone who’d be ideal for the part. If that didn’t feel serendipitous enough, one of her most acclaimed performances helped seal the deal.
“I happened to meet one of the casting directors, and she told me she was on the panel of the International Emmys, and I was nominated that year for ‘Best Actress,'” Yann explained, referring to her 2020 nod for the Singaporean miniseries, Invisible Stories. “When I heard about this and when I heard that Gareth also watched that show, I called the director of the TV show [Jiyuan Ler] and said thank you to him too! It really feels like a fate and full-circle thing.”
While Yann has been in movies with action in them, she’s never been in an action movie like Havoc before. It was an opportunity to try something completely different, and a major reason why she wanted to get involved, allowing her to do weapons training for the first time in her career.
“It’s a genre that I’ve never been in, and I enjoyed myself tremendously, especially all the training that I have on guns and a bit of action,” she said. “I had fun doing the training. I’ve been an athlete since I was a child, I’ve just never been in an action film, and this was really, really, really fun for me.”
Along similar lines, Yann has also played a few parents before, but nobody like ‘Mother’, who travels from the other side of the world with revenge in her mind to track down and eliminate the people responsible for her son’s death. It’s a character of few words, which allowed the actor to use her emotions to dictate her performance.
“She’s shattered and she’s in pain,” Yann explained. “She probably just got the news that her son was killed the night before. So, to me, there’s nothing more painful than a mother losing her child, and I think this pushes her to make extreme decisions, and pushes her to cause all this chaos in the film.”
“As a mother myself, I think I can imagine…” she began before trailing off. “No, I don’t dare to imagine how painful it is. I’m just putting myself there as a mother who just lost someone she loved most in the world, and she just flowed. This character just flowed.”
‘Mother’ doesn’t get much backstory, but that wasn’t a hindrance for Yann. Instead, she created one herself and allowed the offscreen elements that the audience never sees or hears to inform how she played the character on the screen.
“I created my own backstory for the role,” she confirmed. “I’ve imagined her as she could have been a killer when she was younger. She’s probably a killer like Michelle Waterson’s character, and then later on, she became a gang leader, and she had a child. She sort of retired and then really handed over the power to her son. When this happened, she had to come back and do what she could to appease her son’s death.”
Yann doesn’t get a hands-on role in Evans’ signature action sequences, but she does make a memorable entrance by gunning down a couple of her underlings the first time she appears in Havoc. Not that she felt like she’d missed out, though, with Yann preferring the quieter moments to the all-guns-blazing set pieces that have defined the filmmaker’s career.
“I think most of my scenes are actually very quiet,” she elaborated. “I really enjoy the quietness and the stillness in her role. I think my favourite part of the film is when Forest Whitaker and I share that quiet moment in the car. It’s within the chaos. There are these two very vulnerable people. Even though there’s still a power game going on, they’re able to exchange their sadness and vulnerability. That scene is what sets the character for me.”
Yann’s career has seen her tackle drama, comedy, biography, fantasy, and now full-blown action, but there’s another style of cinema that she’s yet to venture into. She’d like to, but isn’t sure if she’s made of the right stuff. “That’s horror,” she offered. “Which I’m not very sure whether I’d be up to or not.”
Having spent most of her career working in Singapore and Malaysia, Yann has broadened her horizons in recent years. In addition to her role in the Hindi anthology series Modern Love: Mumbai, she made her Hollywood debut in the blockbuster Disney+ fantasy American Born Chinese, which starred Academy Award winners Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, among others.
Yann played the mother of Ben Wang’s protagonist, but despite strong reviews, the show was cancelled after one season. It was massively disappointing to discover she wouldn’t get the chance to reprise the role, but it didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for the experience.
“American Born Chinese is one of the best experiences I have had in my filming life,” Yann enthused. “I mean, the family who was acting as family, eventually really became family. Whether it’s the actors, crew members, directors, or our producers and line producers, we still keep a strong bond today.”
“It was really sad for all of us that we wouldn’t continue to do a second season, but I think that is part of my life journey that I met all these great co-actors, my collaborators, and there will be future works that we will do together. And I totally believe in that. Every production, for me, has the element of fate. When we work together, we don’t just share our skills. We actually share our emotions, our love for each other.”
Two of Yann’s most celebrated performances have been for writer and director Anthony Chen in 2013’s Ilo Ilo and 2019’s Wet Season, which won her ‘Best Supporting Actress’ and ‘Best Leading Actress’ trophies respectively from the Golden Horse Awards, regularly cited as Asian cinema’s equivalent to the Oscars.
It was first announced in 2021 that they’d be reuniting for the third and final chapter in Chen’s loosely connected ‘Growing Up’ trilogy, We Are All Strangers. The film is finally shooting, but Yann wasn’t at liberty to divulge much more than that.
“I can only tell you I’m actually in production right now,” she teased. “I just woke up from a late-night shoot, and we’re going to have an overnight shoot tonight. We hope everything goes well. It’s pretty challenging this time because technically, in terms of scale, I think it is way bigger than Ilo Ilo and Wet Season.”
“I’ve got to say, Anthony has matured,” she said of the director who made his English-language debut with Cynthia Erivo’s 2023 drama, Drift, and most recently helmed the romantic drama The Breaking Ice. “Koh Jia [Ler], who was in the three films with me, we have all matured together. It’s such a lucky thing to be in this, in the production with the same group of people and going together. What more could I ask for?”
Yann has been working extensively across theatre, film, and television for almost 30 years now, winning awards and acclaim and constantly looking for new opportunities, the most recent being making Hardy’s life as miserable as possible in Havoc, but she’s never changed her approach, which has always been driven by character rather than trying something different just for the sake of it.
“I think all these years, I didn’t change too much,” she reflected. “I think it’s still about when you’re starting off, I don’t think you are in the position to choose anything. As you grow and mature, you start to be able to have more power in choosing what you would like. I think the material, the story, and the human in the script are always things that I look upon as the most important thing when I choose a project, I would say.”
With that in mind, if Yann had the hypothetical power to wake up tomorrow morning, head down to the set, and start playing her dream character armed with almost 30 years of experience without having to worry about scripts, producers, funding, or anything else, she’d love to revisit one of her favourite roles.
“There was this play I did in my 30s called Thunderstorm by Cao Yu,” came the reply. “I did the character, I played her in the theatre before I had a chance to visit China. After the play, I went to visit China, and I realised that my imagination of the environment was so far away from what I had seen when I was there. If I had the chance now, I would like to play Fanyi in Thunderstorm by Cao Yu again.”
Yann has gone from award-winning Singaporean dramas to a Disney-backed episodic graphic novel adaptation to a Netflix shoot ’em up from one of action cinema’s most talented auteurs in the space of a few years, so why not?
