Michelle Yeoh on winning an Oscar, the reality of glass ceilings and returning to Star Trek

As she embraces her dark side in her latest Hollywood role, Michelle Yeoh reflects on her trailblazing journey from Aussie beauty queen to the Oscars.

In her long and illustrious career, Michelle Yeoh has racked up a seriously impressive list of honours and accolades – not even including the Best Actress Oscar she won in 2023.

In her native Malaysia, she’s a Commander of the Order of Loyalty to the Crown of Malaysia. In France, she’s a Commander of the National Order to the Legion of Honour and just last year she was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for “continuing to shatter stereotypes and enrich American culture”.

“When I first got the message, I must admit I thought someone was playing a prank on me,” she says over Zoom call from London of receiving the highest civilian award of the US from then president Joe Biden. “I was like ‘what? No! Come on guys ..’.

“I was very humbled and very touched to be included in that illustrious list of people that were there – Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore – walking down that aisle with them was already such an immense emotion and actually having my family and all my dear friends and people were so proud for me. So yes, it was very special indeed.”

Michelle Yeoh and her Wicked co-star Ariana Grande attended The National Board of Review Annual Awards Gala in New York earlier this month. Picture: Getty Images

Michelle Yeoh with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. Picture: Getty Images

But, as the saying goes, you always remember your first and as far as international honours go, for Yeoh it was being named Miss Moomba International in Melbourne in 1984.

She’s been back to Australia many times since, for the Australian Grand Prix with her Ferrari boss husband Jean Todt and to film the Marvel hit Shiang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in Sydney, but that first visit when she was a model and aspiring actress will always have a special place in her heart.

“Hey, that was my first ever award outside of my own country, so it’s a memorable one and it was fun,” she says with a laugh. “I got to be on the float. I got to be the Queen of the day – Miss Moomba and what a ring to that.”

After initially wanting to be a dancer – her ambitions were cruelled by a spinal injury – Yeoh parlayed her modelling profile and formidable physical prowess into action and martial arts films in Hong Kong. A role opposite Pierce Brosnan as the ass-kicking Chinese agent Wai Lin in the 1997 Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies introduced her to Western audiences and she cemented her global star status in Ang Lee’s 2000 Chinese language epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Ever since, she’s been a trailblazer for Asian representation in Hollywood culminating in becoming the first Asian woman to win the Best Actress Oscar, taking home the coveted prize for her role as dimension hopping laundromat owner Evelyn in the trippy action comedy Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. In her acceptance speech, she dedicated her win to “all the little boys and girls who look like me” and with this year’s awards season in full swing, says that her win didn’t just change her life, “it’s changed the lives and perspective of a lot of people around that world” but there’s still plenty more to be done.

“That was the biggest thing that came out of it,” she says. “Every day, I’m living that Oscar life which and I’m going to be eternally grateful for that because it gives you more of an edge to have a bigger voice in so many things.

Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh accepts the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Everything Everywhere All at Once. Picture: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP

Michelle Yeoh celebrated her Osar win in 2023 at the famed Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills. Picture: AFP

Picture: Getty Images

“As we know there are still so many glass ceilings. Whatever ceilings there are out there and doors to kick down to be able to really, really say we are being inclusive and we have diversity to the proper degree.”

Yeoh, 61, also spoke of her experiences with racism in her early years in Hollywood as well as long entrenched ageism, particularly for women, and hopes that her enduring success and determination can open doors and provide inspiration for others.

“I think what it is, is a sense of ‘see, it can be done’,” she says. “The reality is you should never give up on your dreams. You should never give up because you’re the first person that can say no and if you say no then there is no other way to go.”

Michelle Yeoh was crowned “Miss Moomba” in Melbourne in the 1980s. Picture: ABC

Yeoh also never gave up on her dream that she would get the chance to reprise one of her favourite roles – that of Star Trek fan favourite Phillippa Georgiou. She’d first played the charismatic antihero – a brutal emperor from an alternative universe who becomes a Starfleet captain – in the 2017 series Star Trek: Discovery, and returned as a special guest star for three seasons. Yeoh says she was fascinated by the character’s dark past, she’d been a murderous dictator in an empire where it was very much kill or be killed, and initially hoped she’d get her own spin-off series.

“I had missed her – and we knew that we hadn’t seen the last of her,” says Yeoh. “In fact if you ask Alex Kurtzman, who is our show runner and creator of the Star Trek: Discovery even before it was launched I had lunch with Alex and I said ‘I want a spin off’.”

As Georgiou in Star Trek: Section 31 streaming on Paramount+. Picture: Jan Thijs/Paramount+

But Yeoh became a victim of her own success. As her roles piled up in projects such as Wicked, the next Avatar movie and a coming Blade Runner series for Prime Video, it became clear that she couldn’t commit to a whole series so the producers pivoted to a movie called Star Trek: Section 31, which streams on Parmount+ from today.

“I knew that this character was so special and especially for an actor to be able to have that kind of darkness and murder and mayhem but at the same time have fun and have fashion,” Yeoh says. “It was like a culmination of so many aspects and complexities that it was just too good to let it go away.”

In Section 31 – which is basically the black ops, Dirty Dozen wing of Starfleet – fans meet Georgiou again as the owner of a giant space station nightclub/alien brothel outside Federation space, where anything goes and life is cheap. She’s recruited by a Section 31 team of motley misfits and given the chance to atone for her many sins if she will help them on a secret mission. It’s wilder, swearier and more violent than any Star Trek project that’s come before it, which is exactly what Yeoh loved about it.

“It’s literally a company of misfits with everybody coming from very complex, very dark history,” says Yeoh. “That’s why they come together right? There is no place else for them to go if they’re trying to do something they think is possibly something good.”

Picture: AFP

Coming hard on the heels of her role is the scheming Madam Morrible in the hugely successful Wicked, Yeoh laughs at the thought she might be entering her “bad bitch” era, as Georgiou is gleefully described by one of the other characters. She admits that it’s “very, very fun” to embrace a villainous role and says that “the idea for us as a storyteller is to be able to shine the light on different issues, whether good or bad”.

“You need to show the dark and the light,” she says. “Without darkness, there is no light. It’s like there is up and down because if there is not that up and down, it’s called a flat line and it means you’re dead.”

Star Trek: Section 31 streams on Parmount+ from January 24.

Originally published as Michelle Yeoh on winning an Oscar, the reality of glass ceilings and returning to Star Trek