Michelle Yeoh has made the transition from action hero to Oscar winner, thanks to her acclaimed performance in “Everything Everywhere All At Once”.
However, it was back in the 1980s that Yeoh got her start in Hong Kong action movies, with her martial arts skills and gymnastic abilities catapulting her to increasingly larger roles.
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As ET Canada continues to celebrate Asian Heritage Month, we look back on some of Yeoh’s most memorable screen stunts.
“Yes Madam” (1985)
Yeoh’s first major stunt was for Hong Kong martial arts film “Yes Madam”, which involved flipping backward and smashing through glass — with her head! — while simultaneously hurling two thugs off a balcony.
In a 2022 interview with Town & Country, Yeoh spoke about attending the “Yes Madam” premiere and watching the audience react in surprise at the intensity of her stunt work.
“They expected that I would just pull a gun and say, ‘Stop or I’ll shoot,’” Yeoh said with a chuckle, recalling that her balcony stunt cause the crowd in the theatre to burst into applause.
Police Story III: Supercop (1992)
As wild as the stunts were in “Yes Madam”, they were only a warmup for her work in “Police Story III: Supercop” (retitled “Super Cop” in North American. Among her most memorable moments was a stunt in which she rolled from the top of a van onto the hood of a car, while both vehicles were moving, nearly crashing her head on the pavement during her first failed attempt.
Then, there’s a sequence featuring Yeoh riding a motorcycle up a ramp and jumping onto a moving train.
When watching the movie during the dubbing process, she recalled her reaction. “I swear, I was going, ‘What was I thinking?’ I was swinging off the side of trucks, I was riding a motorcycle onto a moving train, I was doing the most insane stunts,” Yeoh told Entertainment Weekly.
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One of those stunts — which required her to jump from a moving car onto another car, driven by co-star Jackie Chan — nearly went horribly wrong. “In Asia at that time, we don’t really do rehearsals, we don’t have weeks of preparation. We learn the stunt and we do it,” Yeoh told EW. “So you park the [truck] and Jackie’s car next to each other and you look at it and it’s about a six-foot fall, it’s not much, and you think, I could do this. But once the two cars are moving you go, oh, wow, this is a completely different experience. I’m not standing still, the car isn’t, nothing is still. I don’t know whether it was crazy, a moment of insanity, [but] the thought that went through my head was, you’re never going to know how it feels until you try it.”
“Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997)
In the wake of her success in those Hong Kong movies, Yeoh crossed over into Hollywood for “Tomorrow Never Dies”, starring opposite Piers Brosnan in the 1997 James Bond flick.
Arguably the most memorable stunt in the film features Yeoh and Brosnan, handcuffed together while racing a motorcycle through the streets of Bangkok with bad guys in hot pursuit, with the pair narrowly avoiding being chopped to pieces by the whirling blades of a helicopter.
Discussing her stunt work in an interview, Yeoh recalled that even though Bond producers had seen her stunts in her previous movies, they were hesitant to let her do her own stunts until seeing her in action. That reluctance, she said, evaporated as shooting progressed, and by “halfway through, I was doing most of my own things…”
“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000)
Flying through the air while brandishing a whirling sword in each hand, Michelle Yeoh’s stunt work in director Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” set a new standard for martial arts on the screen.
“I think that was probably the most memorable, the most happy, the most painful, the most emotional…” she told Entertainment Weekly of her experience making the film. However, she also admitted she suffered “one of my worst accidents” when she tore her ACL while filming her first stunt for the film. “The specialist said, ‘It’s not torn, it’s gone.”
As a result, she filmed most of the non-stunt scenes outfitted with a leg brace while she recovered.
“The Witcher: Blood Origin” (2022)
In the spinoff series of Netflix’s “The Witcher”, Yeoh played Scían, the last survivor of a nomadic tribe of sword masters — a role that leaned into her stunt background.
“The cast would practice the stunts for weeks and weeks and weeks,” “Blood Origin” director Declan de Barra recalled in a Netflix interview. “They’d think they have it down, they’d take multiple takes and they’d get it and they’d be very happy. Then Michelle would come on and do one take and they’d go, ‘Oh, that’s how it’s done.’ People would gather to watch her do her takes, but you had to not blink because she nailed it in one go every time.”
“Everything Everywhere All At Once” (2022)
In her Oscar-winning jaunt through the multiverse in “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, Michelle Yeoh’s stunt experience was put to good use in a number of head-spinning fight sequences.
“The most funny, I think, an emotional fight sequence was the one with Jamie Lee Curtis, when she finally gets her head through the wall,” Yeoh told the Los Angeles Times.
“And Jamie, bless her, she did everything. I mean, she came, like, ‘Ahhh’ down the wire by herself. And I was like, ‘Jamie, good for you!’ ’Cause that is what you want. You want to see that kind of, ‘I want to be engaged, I want to be part of this.’ And Jamie has not really done that kind of martial arts. But you can see she can move. She understands where it’s going,” Yeoh continued.
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“That scene was also a challenge for me because it was [my character] Evelyn Wang having gone to another universe — gone to learn all these kinds of moves — now come back,” she added. “I remember that when I did it the first time, and the Daniels came up and said, “Oh, Michelle, could you not look so confident?”
