PASADENA, Calif. — Fresh off of winning a Golden Globe for “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and now starring in another project with a predominantly Asian cast and crew, Michelle Yeoh is hopeful the recent wave of progress for Asian representation in Hollywood is here to stay.
“I think we’ve broken that glass ceiling. I hope we’ve ninja-kicked it to hell, and it will never come back, like Humpty Dumpty together again,” she told reporters Friday at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour during a panel previewing the upcoming Disney+ series “American Born Chinese.” “But the only way we can keep this going is by getting the right storytellers, having the studio executives understand and keep putting it forward, which will create more jobs, which will create more opportunities.”
She warned of the tendency to treat representation as “just tick a box off. ‘Oh, I have a Chinese actor there.’ Tick the box. ‘Oh, OK. That means I’m being diverse. I’ve diversified, and I’m embracing everybody.’ But that’s not the truth,” Yeoh said.
Long a legend in Asia, having started her career as a martial artist and star of Hong Kong cinema, Yeoh has become even more of a legend in recent years, particularly after starring in 2018’s “Crazy Rich Asians.” The film’s success as the first Hollywood studio film in 25 years with a majority Asian cast accelerated a wave of Asian-led major movies and TV that continues with “American Born Chinese.” In the TV adaptation of Gene Luen Yang’s bestselling graphic novel, which premieres this spring, she plays Guanyin, the Chinese goddess of mercy from “Journey to the West,” the classic Chinese mythical novel.
But here, as Yeoh explained, the goddess is reimagined as an “auntie” figure, wearing sweats and a baseball cap and casually dropping into everyday life. It illustrates the distinctive tone of the graphic novel and the show, which cleverly combines “Journey to…
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