The action superstar shines in a new multiverse comedy. She talks about her high-risk, low-budget Hong Kong days, why you can be a superhero in your 60s – and whether she could kick James Bond’s butt
It was the butt-plug fight sequence that finally broke her, says Michelle Yeoh. Best not to spoil the surprise any further, but her new comedy, Everything Everywhere All at Once, throws the veteran actor into a multitude of absurd and unorthodox situations: downing a whole bottle of orangeade then copiously throwing up; having hotdogs instead of fingers; spanking the co-director, Daniel Scheinert, in an S&M get-up. And she loved every minute of it. “I was doing things that I never dreamed of doing!” Yeoh enthuses over a video call from Los Angeles. “But it was never too much.” Until, that is, it came to shooting the kung fu fight with two half-naked male assailants and some dauntingly large sex toys. “When we were doing the butt-plug fight sequences, I was just on the ground, laughing my head off, going like: ‘Oh my God! Would I have ever thought that one day I would be doing this kind of martial arts?’”
Everything Everywhere All at Once is the role of a lifetime for Yeoh. Several lifetimes, in fact. Directed by the duo known as the Daniels (Scheinert and Daniel Kwan), it is a movie as expansive, ambitious and all over the place as its title suggests, zipping across alternate universes, crammed with bizarre action, surreal comedy and manic family drama, but also tackling concerns existential and philosophical. It is a film that can barely contain its over-ripe imagination – think a cross between The Matrix, Michel Gondry and Stephen Chow, with homages to everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey, to In the Mood for Love, to Ratatouille thrown in.
