Remy meets his super hero buddy on the set of Spider-Man
Spider-Man devotee and actor Remy Hii has grown from an unsure boy in a Townsville schoolyard to a professional in demand from Brisbane to Los Angeles
U on Sunday
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When he was being shunned and bullied at primary school in north Queensland, Remy Hii’s hero was a red-and-blue-suited teenager who shot spider webs from his wrists and swung from skyscraper to skyscraper in downtown Manhattan.
He found a connection with “loner” Peter Parker and, as most young boys did, was jealous of the web-slinging abilities of Parker’s alias, Spider-Man.
Little did Hii know, but 20-plus years later he would be standing on a sound stage in London trading lines with current Spidey actor Tom Holland. And, amazingly, it is his character, Brad Davis, who is the one making Peter Parker jealous.
Being the first Marvel Universe film after the franchise “re-set” with April’s release of Avengers: Endgame, there are massive expectations of the upcoming Spider-Man: Far From Home film. Fans are scouring the internet for clues to the plot; while Marvel accountants are crossing their fingers, probably needlessly so, that the film will continue the franchise’s fiscal phenomenon. As of the start of this week, Endgame has grossed a shade under $4 billion worldwide.
With a reported $230 million budget, Spider-Man: Far From Home has less than half of Endgame’s budget ($517 million), but is integral to Marvel’s forward strategy. And, hence, has been shrouded in just as much secrecy.
So much so, that Townsville-raised actor Hii has only been able to speak about his role since producer Eric Carroll revealed some plot points during a UK press tour in May.
“(Brad Davis) is the kind of guy (that) guys like me and Peter hated in high school. His hair is always looking right, the clothes always fit the way they’re supposed to, he always would have something funny to say,” Carroll shared. “He’s not mean-spirited. He doesn’t pick on Peter or shove him in lockers. He just happens to make the girls Peter likes laugh a lot, which makes Peter uncomfortable.
“Basically, (Peter) tries to make Brad look bad. And almost blows up his bus by launching some weaponised drones that this spy team has access to.”
When U on Sunday spoke on the phone to Hii in August last year, while he was on the Spider-Man set in London, he had to be extremely guarded in not giving anything away. And, when we caught up with him last week from Sydney, it was the same.
“I have to step very strictly,” says Hii, who starred in last year’s big screen hit Crazy Rich Asians and TV series such as Marco Polo, Sisters and, up until very recently, Harrow. “It’s crazy what we can and can’t say on this but, yes, basically I’ve got to follow Eric’s lead on it.
“If I say a word too much, God knows what could happen.”
He takes a pause before explaining.
“You’re never quite sure which way Brad’s going to go: is he a likeable rival or is he someone who’s really nasty and underhanded? To be honest we shot it in so many ways, and they’ve got all these options in the can. Even I’m going to be really surprised when I see it for the first time,” he says.
“I get to play opposite Tom Holland, who is just so exciting as Spider-Man. He’s really got the world wrapped around his finger; he’s such a charismatic young guy. We have these really fun, bouncy electric sort of scenes with each other.”
Hii spent three months in London filming, before production moved to Prague for two weeks, then Venice for another two weeks, and then to New York. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.
“We had so many amazing comedic actors on this film,” Hii says, “like Martin Starr, who is part of Judd Apatow’s group, and J.B. Smoove, who is kind of royalty from Curb Your Enthusiasm – and they really set the bar high for improvisation.
“Eric was such a collaborative producer, as was our director Jon Watts. So we’d do several takes of the script version and then they’d just open it up. They’d put a fresh card in the camera and let everyone go nuts. I was really trying so hard to keep it together, because everyone was funny and we all had great chemistry and trust in each other. There was a lot of playing around, which was really cool.”
While Hii made quite a few new friends on the Far From Home set, Spider-Man has been a mate from early on. He was always there, waiting in the comics and on TV, when Hii came home after primary school through the heat-soaked suburbs of Townsville in the mid-1990s. In the schoolyard there were no heroes, no friends, just the seemingly ubiquitous racism and bullying of the time.
“My first year in Australia I spent lunch every day with me and my lunchbox,” says Hii, who moved to Townsville when he was 8.
Born in Malaysia to mix-race parents – mum Kathleen is English, from Manchester, dad Jeffrey is Malaysian-Chinese – Hii moved around a lot as a child because of his father’s work as an entomologist for the World Health Organisation. Dr Jeffrey Hii is a leading scientist in malaria and dengue disease control in the Asia Pacific region.
“I grew up in the international schooling system in Papua New Guinea,” says Hii, “and I got to Australia and people didn’t know where to place me. It was very segregated back then. I really didn’t fit in with the Asian kids; I didn’t fit in with the white kids; because they were like, ‘What type of Asian do you speak? Mandarin? Do you speak Cantonese? Vietnamese?’; the Hong Kong kids were different; everyone kind of had their cliques.
“So it was just like that feeling of I didn’t quite know where I fitted in. And neither did anyone else.”
It was no surprise Spider-Man came to the rescue.
“He was my favourite superhero,” Hii says. “I don’t know, there was something about Spider-Man that thrilled me. Whether it was because of his youthfulness, or that thing of being an outsider. Peter (Parker) at school is very much an outsider and that’s something I’ve always identified with.”
He says the 2017 film Spider-Man: Homecoming – in which Holland first starred in the titular role, having made an appearance a year earlier in Captain America: Civil War – reaffirmed his connection to the web-slinger. Hii points to the film’s themes of struggling in school, “to try and find your place”, and the “awkwardness” of the teenage years. After moving to Brisbane, Hii took an interest in acting – fostered by his mum taking him to numerous QTC and La Boite productions. His high school drama lessons became an escape. His safe place.
“There was racism growing up, of course there was, but I think what that did was force me to get to know myself, because you can’t always expect that other people are going to do that for you,” Hii says. “I had a lot of time to spend with myself and really find myself, so that was the silver lining.”
He laughs at that last statement, seeing the irony of choosing a career where most of the time he’s not himself.
“I’m 32 now, and you know, I feel like that’s one of the wonderful things about being an actor; in each role you get to explore different sides of yourself,” he says. “You can find a side of yourself you never knew existed before. And you do bounce a bit from that confidence to awkwardness. I find myself that I’m always jumping from extroversion to introversion, and everywhere in between! It’s all just part of the process of work and life.”
And in some cases, death. As a central cast member in the Brisbane-made drama series Harrow, Hii – who in January was named in U on Sunday’s inaugural list of Queensland’s hottest rising stars – was as shocked as anyone when his character Simon Van Reyk was killed off part way through season two. The episode went to air earlier this month. Forensic pathologist Simon was assistant and protege to lead character Dr Daniel Harrow, played by Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd. The pair formed a strong friendship.
Hii says it was a “very special project” and the cast and crew were close. He giggles at the suggestion that in his final scene, where Simon’s body is found washed up on the banks of the Brisbane River under the Gateway bridges, his acting is a bit wooden and stiff.
“Look, this is the only time I’ll take that as a compliment,” he grins, admitting it was hard to say goodbye to that production. “Oh my goodness, it was. When the day came, I didn’t sort of really know what to expect. I shot my last scene and they stopped the entire show and, literally, every crew member came in and there were some really heartfelt, wonderful speeches. I couldn’t help myself, I burst into tears. It was really emotional and it came from a very beautiful place.”
He was hoping he would get a break after Harrow and do some travelling, but in mid-March this year he was cast in a pilot for a spin-off to the successful TV series Jane The Virgin, to be titled Jane The Novela, and he was straight on a plane for Los Angeles. Only two months later the spin-off was canned. Hii and a cast which included Jacqueline Grace Lopez, Hunter Parrish and Melrose Place’s Marcia Cross, had shot and cut the entire pilot episode. It was a blow to all of them.
“It was a huge shock actually that it didn’t get picked up, because of the hype about it,” says Hii, who was to play Leun, the boyfriend of the lead character. “I just think they feed numbers into an algorithm machine that spits out a number and it says if it’s profitable or not profitable based on all these variables. It’s cutthroat. For every show that gets picked up, another doesn’t. You just count your blessings and move on.”
The blessing, he says, was that he had the “incredible experience” of working on Jane The Novela which was his first taste of US network television. “It’s a different machine,” he says. “The scale of the production there, the amount of people, everything is just on another level. So it was pretty cool to play in that arena.”
What will be going ahead are the sequels to Crazy Rich Asians, in which Hii played Alistair Cheng. Once director Jon Chu has completed work on his film adaptation of the Broadway musical In The Heights, he is expected to move onto preparing the sequels, which will be filmed back-to-back next year in Shanghai.
Hii’s character is likely to feature more prominently this time around and he is waiting patiently for the green light. “Alistair becomes more and more a character in the following two books (by Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan),” he says. “The first film is really about Nick and Rachel … but Alistair’s story and Fiona Cheng’s story become more important in driving the story in the next book. So I’m really excited about it. There was such an amazing response to the first film.”
But for now, there’s only a few days until Spider-Man: Far From Home is released into the world. And in true Marvel Universe secrecy style, Hii hasn’t even been told yet which cinema he is heading to in LA for the world premiere.
“Not sure exactly what they’ve got in store for us, they’ve even been keeping us in the dark on that,” he says, adding he is stoked Australia is represented in the film and at the premieres by not only himself but also rising Perth actor Angourie Rice. “They’ll give us a plane ticket at some stage I expect; maybe put a blindfold around my face and see where we end up!”
He’s been suit-shopping in Sydney in readiness for the premieres, and has a newly purchased suitcase packed to go. “My beloved yellow suitcase finally carked it,” he laughs. “On my last trip back from the States, when it appeared, it was almost in pieces, so I shed a few tears. I’ve found another one, but it’s just not the same, you know.”
He’ll hang on in LA after the film’s release to follow up on a number of offers of meetings that have come on the back of the excitement Spider-Man is generating. He hopes to eventually make Sydney home. At least he’s not copping pressure from his family to “settle down” at this stage.
“You know what, my parents would not be able to pull that one on me, because they’ve moved every three or four years,” he says.
“If anything, I’m like: ‘When are you guys gonna settle down? You’re retirement age; when are you going to put down some roots?’ So I’ve got some pretty bad role models in that respect.”
And, as he waits in the calm before the July 1 storm, Hii is enjoying being able to breathe a bit.
“We’re all so focused on what’s next and chasing and chasing,” he says. “It’s great just to be able to relax and sit back and go: ‘No, this is cool. There is something sitting around the corner. There is. Don’t worry about it’,” he grins. “It will reveal itself when it is ready.”
Spider-Man: Far From Home, opens July 1
Harrow , ABC, Sundays 8.40pm
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