Michelle Yeoh: How the ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ star became action hero like no other

Michelle Yeoh in "Everything Everywhere All at Once".

At a costume fitting for Tomorrow Never Dies in early 1997, Michelle Yeoh found herself standing next to a Pierce Brosnan lookalike. While the real Brosnan was filming elsewhere, this was a chance for the filmmakers to gauge how the then 34-year-old Malaysian actress would look next to him on camera, in the classic Bond girl pose.

Yeoh was dressed in a sleeveless, silver-sequinned cocktail gown slashed to the waist; the lookalike in the trademark tuxedo. Director Roger Spottiswoode mulled this tableau, while a camera flashed and costume designers scurried around.

“She’s the girl from those Jackie-chickie-Chan films, then?” the double snorted at Spottiswoode – the latest in a series of racially tinged chauvinistic jibes he’d made during the shoot. “Nothing but high heels, this one, right?”

“Just high heels,” Yeoh cut in, before calmly stepping to one side and demonstrating a high kick that brought the point of her stiletto up 120 degrees so it was hovering directly in front of his eyeball.

“I have never seen someone turn whiter faster,” Spottiswoode recalls on a Zoom call from his kitchen. “He had been talking over her head in the most dismissive, sneering way, and then he thought he was about to lose his sight.” Spottiswoode shooed him from the room and apologised to his leading lady. “Well, now we know the outfit will work,” she coolly replied.

Later that year, Tomorrow Never Dies opened in British and US cinemas, and the western world at large was introduced to Michelle Yeoh. Her performance in that film made her a global action star, and convinced Ang Lee to cast her in his 2000 masterpiece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Irish actor Pierce Brosnan as 007 with Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin, on location in Thailand for the James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies", 1997. Photo / Getty Images

“All the Bond films I’d seen before presented the girl as an accessory,” Lee, now 68, remembers on the phone from his New York office. “But with Michelle, it was like watching” – he pauses, searching for a comparison – “I don’t know, Fred Astaire and Judy Garland in Easter Parade. She and Pierce were two equally matched movie stars.”

More than two decades on, Yeoh’s climactic moment of movie star recognition has come – like that stiletto to that cornea – skin-pricklingly close. For her acclaimed performance as a dimension-hopping laundrette owner in the sci-fi comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, Yeoh, now 60, is in contention for the Best Actress Bafta at this Sunday’s ceremony, and for the equivalent Oscar three weeks later.

Yeoh was embraced by Britain early on, making Sunshine with Danny Boyle in 2007. But she embraced Britain first. Born in Malaysia in 1962 to a politician father and lawyer mother, she moved to London at 15 to pursue a childhood dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer at the Royal Academy of Dance.

Unfortunately, a back injury put paid to that. But after re-centring her degree on choreography and drama, she was soon acting in student productions of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde – and to her surprise, enjoying it. Her mother, keen to keep young Michelle’s showbusiness streak going after graduation, entered her into the 1983 Miss World Malaysia pageant: she begrudgingly took part, and won. Casting directors noticed. She was flown to Australia to make an advert for watches alongside Jackie Chan, and that caught the eye of a Hong Kong production company. She had the looks and poise for cinema, but no formal martial arts training, though her background in dance allowed her to learn fast.

Michelle Yeoh in "Everything Everywhere All at Once".

After her 1984 debut, she mastered a new discipline on every film: Wing Chun, Tai Chi, kickboxing, Muay Thai. In 1988 she retired after marrying studio head Dickson Poon – then in 1991 divorced him and got back to work. Her comeback film – Police Story 3: Supercop, with Chan again – is widely considered to be one of the greatest action movies ever made.

Its climactic scene has Chan dangling from a helicopter’s rope ladder as it scuds across the Kuala Lumpur rooftops. Yeoh had pleaded with the director, Stanley Tong, to allow her to do this stunt: “But Michelle,” Tong sighed, “if I let you do that, what on earth can I give Jackie to top it?”

Instead, Tong had her cling onto the side of a van as it barrels down a motorway and jump a motorcycle onto the roof of a moving train.

When Spottiswoode grilled his teenage nephews for ideas after landing the Bond job, he didn’t realise he was speaking to avowed Supercop fans.

Michelle Yeoh in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". Photo / Supplied

“I asked them what I should do differently,” he says. “And they told me I should lose the blonde sidekick and get Michelle Yeoh.”

She brought her own Hong Kong stunt team to the shoot, who Spottiswoode says were shocked at their British counterparts’ conservative approach. “Our boys were jumping off buildings onto 10 feet of cardboard boxes,” he says, “whereas Michelle could land safely on an inch-thick rubber mat.”

Directing her was a pleasure. “There’s no move into performing mode,” says Spottiswoode. “She’s already there, completely natural, in close-up or 25 storeys up on a ledge.”

Shooting Crouching Tiger, Lee felt the same. “Even though she’s an action heroine, she has this very soulful look – she makes your heart race for her. It’s something very special.”

Yeoh’s fight scenes in that film are among the most extraordinary ever filmed and cemented her status as the world’s most thrilling female lead. Even so, the West couldn’t work out what to do with her. In Hong Kong, the martial arts scene kept her busy, while in Hollywood she was typically cast in exotic “Eastern” roles (for example, a pleasure-quarter queen bee in Memoirs of a Geisha).

Michelle Yeoh plays the disapproving mother in "Crazy Rich Asians". Photo / AP

On the rare occasion she was cast more imaginatively, confusion reigned: at the London Critics’ Circle Awards last month, where Yeoh won the Dilys Powell Award for Excellence in Film, the director Danny Boyle recalled being buttonholed by a studio executive after a test screening of 2007′s Sunshine, in which he’d cast her as a space-faring biologist.

“You mean to say we’ve got the greatest action heroine of all time as voted by Rotten Tomatoes,” the suit fumed, “and you killed her off at the end of the second act without even one fight? We’re f---ed.”

The last role of her 40s was the Myanmar revolutionary leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s 2011 biopic The Lady. Beyond that age, roles for any woman in Hollywood become scarce. Afterwards came two Marvel cameos and a substantial comic role in Crazy Rich Asians. But it took Everything Everywhere All at Once to utilise the full scope of her talents: her extraordinarily centred, quiet expressivity, her split-second comic timing, her daunting physicality and poise.

Jamie Lee Curtis and Michelle Yeoh in a scene from "Everything Everywhere All At Once". Photo / AP

To Lee, the film contains “a lot of clashing elements” and Yeoh is what holds it together. “She’s the reason you follow it. She’s its soul.”

“I think Michelle has the skills of a pro athlete but her superpower, her ability to drop into a moment with authenticity and vulnerability with almost no help from the director,” says Daniel Scheinert, who directed her in Everything Everywhere All at Once. “Maybe because of the shoot style of Hong Kong cinema, she can just drop into a scene, and you believe it with no coaxing or rehearsal or careful direction. We’d suggest that she get emotional in a scene, she’d say okay, and squirt out a tear.”

She is also the first Asian actress since Merle Oberon in 1936 to be nominated for the Best Actress Oscar (although to avoid prejudice at the time, Oberon never disclosed her Sri Lankan heritage). If she wins it – or the Bafta, or both – what will that mean?

“It will make her a symbol of something, whether she likes it or not,” Lee chuckles. “And I’m not sure she will like it. There will be pressure, but also so much excitement. For our industry and for the Asian community, it would be very big.”

Scheinert agrees: “I’m loving this moment to celebrate an adult woman, to celebrate a character like Evelyn, to celebrate a brave risk-taking performance.”

“She’s done European films and British films and American films, but she should have done so many more,” Spottiswoode says. “Just talking about her makes me want to find her another role. Michelle is an incredible talent. But more than that, she’s the definition of what an international talent should be.”