From the Oscars to Wicked: Michelle Yeoh’s journey to hollywood icon
Is there anything she can’t do? From martial arts classics to the Oscars limelight, and now a starring role in the hotly anticipated Wicked, Michelle Yeoh is on a roll.
A stunt is not real life. It is an expertly choreographed dance, like riding a motorcycle onto a speeding train, which Michelle Yeoh does in 1992’s Supercop. Yeoh, 62, has been doing stunts ever since she’s been making movies, and she’s been making movies for a very long time. “I do love what I do,” she smiles. “You have to have the passion. Otherwise it is very draining. Otherwise it will make you go insane.”
But sometimes a stunt can go wrong. A few times in Yeoh’s career, which spans ’80s Hong Kong action movies all the way to this month’s lavish adaptation of Wicked, she’s been unlucky enough for choreography to cross the dimensions into reality. Here’s just one: Yeoh was on set in Beijing making Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee’s 2000 martial arts masterpiece. The action sequences were designed by legendary choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, who arrived at training, took one look at Yeoh – whom he had schooled to fight off hordes of men in several movies – and said, “What are you doing here? Go home.” If there was anyone who didn’t need to learn these stunts, it was Yeoh. “I was very, very fit,” she reflects, maybe even – 37 at the time – the fittest she has ever been. “In a way, it messes with your head, because you think you are invincible,” she continues. “You’re like, ‘Wow, I am ready for everything’. Run up the wall, run down the wall, do this, do that. You don’t even think about it.”
So there she was, a week into the opening action sequence, strung on wires to match her co-star Zhang Ziyi in movements equal parts graceful and fierce. Up and down they leapt. Back and forth they parried. In the role of Yu Shu Lien, a seasoned warrior, Yeoh barely even broke a sweat, because that’s what she was, too. But on one jump, her foot grazed the leg of the stunt double and she went crashing down. “When I landed, it felt like someone clubbed my knee,” she recalls. She had torn her anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL. Actually, as a surgeon put it to her later, her ACL was gone, the muscles in her leg reduced to quivering jelly.
She told director Ang Lee that she would not be able to return to set for three months. “I’m sure it cost them,” she admits. “But he was like, ‘I am waiting for you’.” Then, a week after surgery on her knee, Lee called her. “He says, ‘I need you to come back for one day’.”
It was for an intimate moment with her co-star Chow Yun-fat as Li Mu Bai, her character’s great, unfulfilled love, and if they didn’t film it now they never would. “My leg was swollen up to here,” Yeoh remembers, but she strapped on a brace and got through it. Despite all that, Lee admonished her: “Michelle, I can see you are limping.” Yeoh narrows her eyes at the memory. But now, when she watches the film back, “I know what Ang was talking about”, she admits. For the record, in all the many times I’ve seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I have never noticed anything even approaching a limp. All I see is Yeoh performing movements so weightless it is as if she is floating in an endless sea.
By the time Yeoh arrived on the big screen, she had already lived many lives. The first was as a ballet dancer: born in 1962 in Malaysia, she attended the Royal Academy of Dance in London until a back injury ended her dream. Her second life, courtesy of a forged signature by her mother on an application form, was as a pageant queen. Yeoh was named Miss Malaysia in 1983 and, a year later, touched down in Melbourne for the Miss Moomba competition. She won. “I’m the Moomba Queen!” she yelps, flinging her arms up in a perfect pageant flourish.
Back then, Yeoh was “always eager to see what mischief or adventures I could get into”. She is still that girl. If her 21-year-old self was “bright-eyed”, then Yeoh at 62 is bushy-tailed, so full of energy that her hand gestures rattle her laptop as she speaks one morning from Prague, where she’s filming a Blade Runner television series; the effect is like conducting a Zoom call by way ofThe Bourne Identity. Her laugh is a girlish giggle – hee hee hee.
“She’s like a kid,” affirms Wicked director Jon M. Chu, who has twice collaborated with Yeoh. “Does she really need to be acting? No. This is her hobby. And she loves it. She loves to play.”
Her boundless energy is paired with an innate elegance. When Yeoh makes her grand entrance in Wicked, in a shimmering gown the colour of a new penny, the entire cast in the scene leaps to their feet in applause. It feels appropriate. All I can add is that nobody has ever looked this good bare-faced on a video call: radiant skin, sprite-like brown eyes and a tumble of jet hair.
Our order of business is to discuss Wicked, the blockbuster adaptation of the musical that reframed The Wizard of Ozwhen it opened on Broadway in 2003. Yeoh stars as Madame Morrible (a role played on stage by everyone from Carol Kane to Miriam Margolyes), headmistress of Shiz, the university where Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande, stealing the show) are learning the tools of their magical trade. Madame Morrible is the villain of the piece, stoking discord by playing on people’s fear of what they don’t understand.
Steering the ship with style is Chu, who previously directed Yeoh as the lacquered Eleanor Young in Crazy Rich Asians. “Jon, how come every time there is a deliciously wicked character, you always think of me?” Yeoh muses, with a grin.
“She’s just a powerhouse,” says Chu. “The moment she walks into a room she sets the tone, she sets how classy it’s going to be, she sets what’s expected of you. She walks onto that set, everyone gives their best.”
From the scrappy days of her early career in Hong Kong, Yeoh did all her own stunts, and she made them look so easy, her leg rising to kick an opponent as if it were on a spring. (It’s her signature move, on display in everything from cult martial arts movies to her Bond Girl turn in Tomorrow Never Dies.) But there is a stillness in Yeoh too, and it is crucial to all her best performances. The way hope washes over her face like watercolour in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at the briefest mention of Li Mu Bai’s name. InCrazy Rich Asians, Yeoh’s whispered delivery of “You will never be enough” reduced her scene partner Constance Wu to tears. “I thought her eyes went black,” Chu remembers. “I’d never in my life imagined how those words could be performed in a way that would have such an effect.”
And then there was Evelyn, worn-out doyenne of a laundromat and the only person who can save the multiverse in Everything Everywhere All At Once. For her electric performance, she won Best Actress at the 2023 Oscars, joining Halle Berry as the only two women of colour to win that award. Yeoh was in production on Wicked during the awards season, flying back and forth from London for the Oscars. “She was exhausted,” Chu admits. “And she was on set 36 hours later.” He remembers congratulating her in front of Wicked’s entire cast and crew. “I got on the mic to say, ‘Oscar Award-winning Michelle Yeoh,’ and all of a sudden this thing came over me, and I just started screaming like she was a Beatles member. I’m holding her shoulders, and we’re jumping up and down, and now we’re crying. I couldn’t help it.” The memory brings Chu to tears, more than a year later. “She so deserved that … And to see her joy in that moment, like finally she gets that appreciation.”
Yeoh still calls Everything Everywhere All At Once “our little movie”. Nobody, not least Yeoh herself, thought the film with hotdog fingers and butt plug kung-fu was going to win seven Academy Awards. But having achieved the highest echelon of acting success, Yeoh’s ambitions are undimmed. For one thing, she finds renewed energy in the interest of the next generation. “I am so proud when young people come up and say, ‘Can I have a photo with you?’ Before, it didn’t happen,” she says.
But Yeoh adds that she doesn’t feel the burden of representation, like she can’t stop working because stepping back might pave over all the broken glass ceilings that she has kicked in. “I don’t feel that kind of responsibility,” she begins. “I’ve been inspired by people to do certain things, but it doesn’t mean that if that person doesn’t continue to do [that, I’ll stop], because I’ve found my own path. When someone says to me, ‘Oh I want to be just like you.’ I’m like, ‘I’m very happy I inspired you to try but this is something that you believe in for you. You have to forge your own path. Don’t be someone else’.”
We should probably talk about the singing. Because it did initially give Yeoh pause, when she began leafing through the script for Wicked. “You know I don’t sing, right?” she told Chu. His response? “Nah, don’t worry about it.”
But Yeoh was worried. In Wicked, she would have to sing with her co-star Cynthia Erivo, a Tony Award winner with a flawless soprano. Still… isn’t Michelle Yeoh fearless? “Physically doing something, that’s different,” she counters. But then she pauses, weighing it up. “You are right. I’m fearless. So that’s why I did accept it.”
Yeoh has always approached her work, and her life, with an eagerness to learn. “Maybe you’ll discover something new about yourself,” she says of her mindset when trying new things. In her twenties she spent entire days in the gym, studying how to duck and weave like the stuntmen she was emulating. For Wicked, she was assigned a vocal coach and attended her lessons with the solemnity of a monk. “[The coach] sat me down and said, ‘Throw out all the things that you think makes a good way of projecting your voice. It’s not about that. First of all, have fun’.” An example: Yeoh opens her mouth and makes the wailing sound of an ambulance siren with great gusto, an exercise designed to help her relax into the act of singing. She beams. “You go, ‘Actually I can do it. Not bad!’”
Chu says: “I know she was scared, but there was not one moment she said, ‘I can’t do this.’ She’s the most confident, capable person I’ve ever met.” He has known this ever since their first partnership on Crazy Rich Asians, a watershed moment for Asian representation that changed the course of Yeoh’s career. “Madame Morrible – five years ago, that role would have never come to me,” Yeoh admits. For Chu, it was simple. “I am not trapped in ‘This is what a villain looks like,’” he explains. “Madame Morrible can look like whatever you want … When I think of Michelle, I think, ‘Who do you want to look up to? Who do you want to feel honoured to see you?’ And then, ‘Who do you want to step on you? Who would be the scariest person?’ She can do all of those things.”
Yeoh points to herself, Chu and Erivo (who is British Nigerian) as three examples of the breadth of casting diversity in Wicked. “Jon, ABC [American Born Chinese], me, from Malaysia, Chinese. Then Cynthia, being who she is. We have struggled and fought to be where we are today.” Each of their backstories enrich this fairytale about the power in difference; put simply, it matters that the role of Elphaba, a woman isolated and denigrated because of the colour of her skin, is played by a Black actor. “There are so many changes in our world, acceptance of differences is now more and more apparent,” Yeoh muses. “But Wicked is not just acceptance from other people, but mostly from you – for what you believe you are and what you can do.”
It’s also just a really good show. In Broadway history, only The Lion King has sold more tickets than Wicked. The film captures all of the exhilarating energy of those musical numbers, translating it for the big screen without losing the silliness that makes it truly sing. The scale of the world created on screen is breathtaking. The only word Yeoh can find to describe it is big. “[Although] I’ve been in the business for so long. I walk in and go, ‘Oh my god,’” Yeoh marvels. “It will be such an experience to see that fantastical land of Oz. To go to Munchkinland. To literally run through a field of nine million tulips – not CGI … it just takes your breath away.”
Every morning Yeoh lies in bed, stretchingevery muscle in her body, and repeats the same mantra. I’m sorry. Forgive me for all the things I’ve done to you. Thank you. Because at 62, everything hurts a little bit more. Even when you’re Michelle Yeoh. “When you are born, you know you will age and then you will die,” she says, remarkably brightly. “But in that process, how do you keep wellness? I found my own way.”
In her twenties and thirties – “maybe even 40,” she admits – she loved to go clubbing. “I don’t go out [now],” she says. “I’ll have dinner with the girls, and if they go partying… bye bye!” The problem isn’t the energy levels but the aftermath. “The recovery takes much longer. In the past, when I’ve knocked a few drinks back, the next morning it’s like, ‘Woo-hoo! Let’s go.’ Now I’d be like, ‘Oh my god. What was I thinking?’” These days, Yeoh’s secret is: “You can party really, really well for two hours.”
Chu can pinpoint the exact moment he fell in love with Yeoh, and it was filming Crazy Rich Asians’ final scene. “My mom came to visit and I turned my back,” he remembers, “and they’ve ordered three bottles of champagne.” Chu steeled himself to tell them off – this was the crucial final scene! Yeoh had to pull off “this great look” that would wrap the whole movie up in a bow! “She’s like, ‘Get away Jon. We can do whatever we want.’” He grins. “It was awesome.”
With age, some things get more joyous, more full. Last July, after 6992 days together, Yeoh and Jean Todt, the former CEO of Ferrari, got married in Geneva, where they live. They are a good match: both have a sly sense of humour and a youthful spirit. Todt is also the keeper of Yeoh’s Oscar statuette. “It was back in Malaysia for a while, and now my husband Jean has absconded it,” she smiles. “He and my mum are having this little, ‘OK, you have it for a while, and I have it for a while.’ I’m like, ‘Whatever makes you guys happy’.”
On New Year’s Day 2024, the couple became grandparents when Todt’s son welcomed a baby boy. “Finally!” Yeoh exclaims.
Yeoh loves to work. She has five projects in production and a second instalment of Wicked still to come next year. “But I’m also not afraid to say no, because what I say yes to takes me away from my family, people that I love,” she says. Every morning while she’s been in Prague, her stepson and his wife hold the phone up to her grandson’s face so she can see his big blue eyes. “I can’t wait to finish and be able to go back,” Yeoh beams. “He’s so cuddly!”
When Yeoh won the Oscar in 2023, she stood on stage and declared: “Ladies, don’t let anybody tell you you are ever past your prime.” Yeoh’s prime is now. All at once.
Wicked is in cinemas on November 21
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