Michelle Yeoh as Yu Shu Lien - Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

No one is allowed to complain about Wanda accidentally enslaving an entire town if they also think that Strange intentionally making a man beat himself for 3 weeks, just for shits and giggles, was a totally okay thing to do

Michelle Yeoh for GQ

Doctor Strange burying his own dead body like

You know what ? Maybe she was being reasonable.

Wandavision Episode 9 - “The Series Finale”

This is Chaos Magic, Wanda. And that makes you the Scarlet Witch

https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2022/03/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-1.html

Yeoh in ‘‘The Stunt Woman’’ (1996).  Alamy

“I know I’m in serious trouble when Sammo calls me by my real name: It’s like, ‘Choo Kheng! Choo Kheng!”’ she recalls. “And I looked up and there was Ann Hui. She was right next to the boxes. And she was looking at me with tears just rolling down her face.” Yeoh worked to calm herself, concentrating on the fact that she could still feel her hands, as members of the crew placed the mattress (with her still on it) in a van, and drove her straight to the hospital, where she was placed in a body cast and treated for several cracked ribs. 

The accident illustrated the special risks involved in moving between different modes of filmmaking, from the slapdash and high-energy environment of Hong Kong action movies — often shot without a script and choreographed on set — to more staid, introspective films that prioritize psychological depth. Yeoh was being asked to consolidate all that she knew about falling into a character who knew much less — and bridging the difference required a new sort of agility. 

With Pierce Brosnan in “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997).  Photofest

Now that Yeoh is 59, decades into a series of performances that have made her one of the most recognizable Asian actors in the world, it’s clear that what might have been a career-ending injury was, for her, just another obstacle to vault over. Since her first starring role as a high-kicking police inspector in “Yes Madam!” (1985), Yeoh has performed in dozens of other action films, from fast-paced Hong Kong martial-arts films to wuxia features — Chinese historical epics set in a time of warriors and warlords — to more contemporary Western fare. She fought alongside Jackie Chan in “Supercop” and took the nimble, lightning-quick combat style of Hong Kong cinema to the James Bond franchise in “Tomorrow Never Dies,” in which she rode a motorcycle through the streets of Bangkok while handcuffed to Pierce Brosnan.

Over the years, Yeoh has cemented her image as a self-assured combat expert, the serious and confident counterpart to whoever is at her side. In Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), she soared across courtyards and rooftops while subtly articulating the feeling roiling within the Qing dynasty warrior she played. As the star of more character-focused films like Luc Besson’s “The Lady” (2011) as well as international blockbusters like “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), she embodied refined self-containment.

But in her latest turn — as the multifaceted star of this April’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film — Yeoh draws from previously unknown emotional and comedic reserves, bringing the full force of her physicality to the portrayal of a middle-aged woman whose ordinariness makes her the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown. “The work she does,” Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays a supporting role in the film, told me over the phone, “it shows her incredible facility as an actor, the delicacy of her work as an actor, and her absolute beastly work as a physical martial artist.” It’s also the first time audiences will see Yeoh play someone whose movements are uncertain, someone with abundant gray hairs, someone whose body struggles to do what she asks of it — and the first time she’s been called upon to loosen the elegance and poise that has defined her career so far and let her own electric, slightly neurotic personality slip through.

The film follows Evelyn Wang, a Chinese American immigrant mother who made a key decision decades ago to leave her judgmental father behind and follow her boyfriend, Waymond, to America. Years later, Evelyn is living out the underwhelming consequences of that decision: an unexceptional life taking place above the laundromat they operate at the margin of financial failure; a strained marriage to Waymond; a daughter whose Americanized feelings are illegible to her. 

In “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022), a starring role written exclusively for Yeoh.  A24

On top of all that, their business is being audited. While Evelyn is at the I.R.S. with mounds of receipts, she is pulled aside by a dynamic, take-charge version of her husband, who tells her that he’s from a parallel universe under siege — and that she’s the only one who can save them all. What follows is a wild, absurd romp through alternate versions of Evelyn’s life, ranging from the glamorous (in one she’s a celebrated actress trained in martial arts — basically, Yeoh) to the hilarious (a hibachi chef) to the profane (an alternate path where people have hot dogs for fingers).

Approaching a role that bounds gleefully across so many modes and genres put Yeoh to the test. She showed me a photo of her script, dutifully flagged with adhesive tabs that denoted the genre of each scene she appears in (action sequences, comedic scenes, heavy-duty drama): The stack of pages bristled with color, like a wildly blooming flower. She experimented with different kinds of sticky notes. “With the fat ones, they were overlapping so much. So, I had to get the skinny ones,” she told me. “Oh, my God, it was a whole creative process. And then when I finished, I looked at it and go, Oh, my God, I’m in serious trouble.”

It was a quiet, blue-tinged morning in Paris, where Yeoh lives much of the year with her partner and fiancé, Jean Todt, a longtime motorsports executive. We were sitting at a large table in the penthouse suite of a hotel not far from her Eighth Arrondissement home; she divides her time among France, Switzerland and Malaysia. Yeoh wore a cream turtleneck sweater, and there was a refined quality to her high cheekbones and smooth brow that reminded me equally of the ancient Chinese lady warriors and ultrawealthy socialites she has played, though with her subtly cat-eyed glasses and the way she kept urging me to eat — the table was blanketed in breakfast pastries — she also reminded me of my most elegant auntie.

Yeoh promised to take me through a bit of her daily fitness routine, so I had come to the hotel expecting to watch her do the elliptical, her favorite mode of exercise, in the guest gymnasium. Instead, she asked me to follow her to the hotel suite’s bedroom, where she took off her shoes and lay down on the pillowy bedding — then mimed waking up. (She had decided that a basic workout would be “too boring.”) She stretched her body as far out as it could go on the vertical axis, pointed her toes downward and let her fingertips brush the headboard of the oversize bed. Next, she shifted into a series of reaching, grasping movements, which she described as “climbing an invisible wall.” Her light, wiry body lengthened as she pulled against an imagined resistance. She softly chanted, Om mani padme hum, a Buddhist mantra that she invokes to keep herself safe and blessed. “And the other one I say to myself is: ‘Please forgive me. I’m sorry. Thank you, I love you,’” she said, closing her eyes for a long moment. “Because, you know, I hurt myself doing some things. So I say it to my own body before I do anything.”

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