Michelle Yeoh has been receiving some of the best reviews of her career with Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is saying something considering she was outstanding right from the start. But she wasn’t the filmmakers’ first pick. That would be her sometime co-star Jackie Chan. Yeoh was the one who convinced Chan, who used to have issues about women doing martial arts, that women could do martial arts. How did she do that? By taking after him and almost killing herself to entertain. And when he reached out to congratulate her on the film’s success, she couldn’t help but tease him.
In a new interview with The Guardian, the highly in-demand actress and martial arts god mentioned that Chan recently contacted her. “Jackie actually texted me,” Yeoh said. “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!’”
Filmmakers Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (billed simply as “The Daniels”) admitted that their original idea for the action-comedy-drama-fantasy — about a Chinese immigrant who discovers she can access a multitude of versions of herself and her family in different universes — focused on the husband, eventually played by Ke Huy Quan. Chan was their first pick, though, but he was “unavailable.” Then they wondered about making it about the wife instead, which is when “something clicked.” And, well, you know the rest.
(Via The Guardian)
