Michelle Yeoh: ‘Finally we are being seen’

We have an entire corner of the Mandarin Bar to ourselves. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Knightsbridge has kept the three tables nearest us free, as a kind of demilitarised zone against selfie-hunters.

Michelle Yeoh sweeps in only a little late, back from the studios at Elstree. She’s a tiny vision in black: big boots, what look like leather leggings and a zippy fleece, topped off incongruously with a trilby-like hat. Meeting a movie star, you feel your every inadequacy. Even my suit trousers seem to have mysteriously shrunk.

We have booked tea for 3pm, and I was worried the Miss Malaysia turned action woman turned film star wouldn’t eat. When I interviewed her once at her home (well, one of them) in Geneva, she took me to the kitchen and fed me apple pie, but abstained herself. Today, happily for the FT, she has missed lunch, and enters proclaiming her appetite.

Her career advanced from Hong Kong fight movies with Jackie Chan through the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But only now, at 60, is she approaching the summit: on March 12, she hopes to become the first Asian woman to win the Oscar for best actress, for her role as downtrodden Chinese immigrant laundromat owner Evelyn Wang in the small-budget indie science-fiction fantasy Everything Everywhere All at Once. In recognising Yeoh, Hollywood is recognising the Asian artists it previously marginalised.

From the tea menu, she chooses vegan sliders (essentially, small burgers) with cheese. I order the har gau dim sum.

“That’s not a lot,” she remarks, pushing me to get more. I didn’t miss lunch (never do) but eagerly add duck rolls.

She adds, playfully, “I want my spicy margarita.”

“I know,” replies the waitress. Yeoh is staying in the hotel while filming the musical Wicked, “with Jon Chu, he’s directing, Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jeff Goldblum”.

“Wow,” I marvel.

“Yeah, wow! I’m a very lucky girl.”

Presumably this is a bigger production than Everything Everywhere?

“Hahaha. Yes, oh my God. We were like a 14.5 [meaning millions of dollars in production costs, though in fact the media have reported $25m]. This is — I don’t know, hundreds of millions. He’s building Munchkinland. It’s such a joy to go to spectacular sets, where you’re not just looking at a green screen and imagining.”

London is Yeoh’s second hometown. She started life in Ipoh in provincial Malaysia, as Yeoh Choo Kheng. Were her parents, like Evelyn’s in the film, sorry she was born a girl? “Not at all! We grew up laid-back. Life was happy, we were very multiracial. I would speak to my dad mainly in English, to my mom in Malaysian Cantonese, because my grandmother was living with us and she basically only spoke Cantonese. My best friend in school was Malay. You’re different cultures, but who cares? We celebrated each other’s New Years and things like that.”

Adding to the mix, Yeoh attended a convent school “with still that British mentality. Our principal was a nun and she spoke the Queen’s English. She was Chinese.”

When her two sliders arrive, Yeoh exclaims at their size. “Woah! You will have one, right?”

“If you insist.”

“I insist terribly.”

Hollywood was so, so very insular . . . America made me suddenly aware, ‘You’re a minority,’ and I went, ‘What?’

She asks the waitress for chopsticks and wishes me “Bon appétit”, a nod to our shared Parisianness. I live there full-time and Yeoh part-time with her French partner, Jean Todt, former boss of Ferrari’s all-conquering Formula 1 team.

Attending a British-influenced school in freshly decolonised Malaysia, she grew up thinking London was the centre of the universe. She came here aged 15 to study ballet, “the girl from a small city”, and was enchanted by the June sunshine. “A sweet friend took me on a double-decker bus and I was like, ‘Wow, London is not that big.’ He goes, ‘This is a small part of it.’”

Injuries kiboshed a ballet career. But unbeknown to Yeoh, her mother entered her for Miss Malaysia. Her victory led to making fight movies in 1980s Hong Kong. At first, she grumbles, “I was put in the box of women [who] were protected, and damsels in distress”. She wanted to jump off motorbikes on to speeding trains and kick people in the face, like the men did. The wannabe dancer became a pioneering action woman, racking up frightful injuries at a time when Hong Kong stunt films didn’t exactly follow health and safety regulations. Just then, China was opening up, and Yeoh’s family began visiting her grandparents’ village, where they tended the ancestral graves.

She grew big enough in Hong Kong to get calls from Hollywood, which she once called “a dream come true — until I got here”. She explains: “I took meetings with agents who literally went, ‘Oh, you’re Malaysia, is that Japan? And why do you speak English?’ At that point, Hollywood was so, so very insular. They didn’t need to look beyond their backyard, because the box office in the world couldn’t be bigger than theirs. America made me suddenly aware, ‘You’re a minority,’ and I went, ‘What?’,” she laughs.

Did the US recast her from global citizen with multiple identities into “Asian”? “They need to explain, put labels on things. For them it’s clarification. I think the more you try to do that, the more you divide people.”

Yeoh would prefer a society without ethnic labels. “Like Star Trek,” she muses. The series has diverse characters (Yeoh played Captain Philippa Georgiou) whose backgrounds go unmentioned. “They’re part of the Federation. Gender equality, it’s all there.”

Hollywood is less fair. After decades there, she notes that Everything Everywhere “is the first time I’m number one on the call list”.

She points to the stunted career of Vietnamese-American actor Ke Huy Quan, who plays her husband in the film. Aged 12, he was a child star in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Yeoh says, “Then you suddenly realise, ‘Er, OK, then what?’” As an Asian adult, Quan couldn’t find roles, and abandoned acting for years until he was inspired to return by the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians, starring Yeoh. Everything Everywhere earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Crazy Rich Asians helped multiply Asian roles. This year Yeoh, Quan and their screen daughter in Everything Everywhere, Stephanie Hsu, will star in the new Disney+ series American Born Chinese. “The last few years, things have changed phenomenally,” Yeoh says.

Has the Sino-American new cold war impinged on the industry, ending decades of excitement about China’s film market? “Oooooh, tremendously,” she sighs. “When it first started, that was the time when there were most connections, storytellers, good things were starting to bubble.”

Our vegan sliders taste like high-quality beef, but Yeoh has only nibbled hers. Her margarita looks almost intact. Perhaps for film stars, food and drink are for signalling rather than consuming. Not so for journalists: my har gau is excellent, but the duck rolls dry.

I ask about her relationship with food. “As you can see, I eat,” she claims. “I just eat in moderation. My normal weight is about 44.”

It takes me a moment to grasp the unit: she actually means 44 kilogrammes.

Like most of Hollywood’s best roles, hers in Everything Everywhere was originally written for a man, Jackie Chan. The film’s creators, Daniel Schweinert and Daniel Kwan, rewrote it for her, naming the character Michelle.

Yeoh told “the Daniels”, to their dismay: “You have to change the name. I think you do Evelyn Wang a great disservice, because this very ordinary Asian immigrant mother, wife, deserves to be seen. Because you walk past her in the supermarket in Chinatown, you won’t even think about the worries she has — to make ends meet, to have a conversation with her daughter.”

I chide Yeoh: she has recited the same line in other interviews. “Right,” she admits. “But it’s so important that people understand. I used to try and change every detail [in interviews] but someone said, ‘No, there are certain points where it has to be like a mantra.’”

Evelyn is Yeoh’s opposite: a dowdy laundromat owner weighed down by life. How did Yeoh try to understand her?

“I go to Chinatown.”

“Which Chinatown?”

“I was in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London. Every city has their Chinatown. Even in Hong Kong you will find it. I think the same race or culture, they are drawn to each other because they feel, ‘This way we are more protected.’ So it’s not difficult to find them. It’s just that we normally don’t see them.”

[To win an Oscar] is to be given a seat at the table. To say, ‘Make more roles for us. Give us the opportunity to compete’

Can a global celebrity wander about Chinatown? I mean, here we are, hiding in our protected corner even in the heart of the plutocracy.

With her fingers, Yeoh mimes pulling a mask over her perfect mouth. “Wearing a mask is a norm in Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. If you have a cold [it’s] the first thing you do. It’s a hygiene thing, a courtesy thing.”

Behind her mask, how does she observe women like Evelyn? “I watch the way they walk, their mannerisms, how their posture becomes: always eyes forward, intention. It’s not about looking [around]. When you do these kinds of characters, you look into a side of life that you are lucky that you’re not there.

“I never include myself in characters I play. What if you were asked to play a psycho killer? I’m not a method actor. But I take pride in really researching who your character is, so once you put on the clothes, you’re that character. You’re not Michelle Yeoh trying to pretend to be that character.”

As the cast’s biggest star, she tried to set a tone of niceness, calming colleagues who were awed by her — much as she appears to be doing with me. “What I love about [making movies] is, it has to be collaborative. When we look at each other we know: ‘I am totally invested in you. And I need the same from you.’”

Everything Everywhere was filmed largely in an Internal Revenue Service building in Simi Valley, California. Yeoh says that, in a small-budget film, “everything is more magnified and intense. You look at each other and go, ‘Don’t have the money!’ So your creative juices work harder.

“When we started it was like, ‘The box office, oh, it’s not bad for a small film with limited release.’ Even A24 [the film’s distributor] were like, ‘If you guys get 30-something [meaning $30mn in US box office], you should be doing cartwheels.’ So did we think we would be here thinking, ‘What’s the dress I’m going to wear for the Oscars?’” The film has grossed more than $100mn worldwide.

Its emotional core is a difficult mother-daughter relationship. “Women my age come up and say, ‘I’m not quite sure what your movie is about. But my daughter went to see it and she called me and I haven’t spoken to her for, like, two years.’”

The day of the Oscar nominations, Yeoh gathered on Zoom with cast members in far-flung time zones. “We were like, ‘Let’s virtually hold hands. Because if it doesn’t happen, you’ll be crushed.’” The film got 11 nominations, including Yeoh’s first for an Oscar. She was also nominated for best actress in the British Bafta awards, but all 49 winners in all categories in last month’s event were white. Todt, her husband, told me about that night: “There was a certain disappointment, so we didn’t go to the official dinner. She ordered Malaysian fast food in the room.”

Nodding to Todt’s industry, I ask Yeoh whether winning an Oscar is like winning a Formula 1 Grand Prix. She reflects. “I don’t know whether you can compare it. This is like a validation from your peers, from the people you work with, the people that understand the job. You are loved, and your work is loved and respected. In a Grand Prix, they don’t collectively vote to say, ‘You are the best driver.’”

But she adds, “It’s not about me any more. I love when Asians come up and say, ‘You have to do this, you’re doing it for us.’ I’m like, ‘Err, OK, no pressure.’ This group of people feel like finally we are being seen and it’s — oh!”

Her waving arm has smashed a bottle on to the floor. She’s not superhuman after all. “I’m sorry,” she says. “There’s a slope on the desk.” She starts gathering shards in a napkin until the waitress stops her. When our teas arrive, Yeoh pours me mine, and offers to charge the meal to her room. I refuse.

Ahead of the Oscars ceremony, she complains of shredded nerves. “Everyone says, ‘Just enjoy the process.’ I’m like, ‘What part is there to enjoy? It’s terrible!’”

I say I understand that an Oscar for Yeoh would uplift Asian people. But what would it mean for her personally? She tries deflecting the question: “It’s to be given a seat at the table. To say, ‘Make more roles for us. Give us the opportunity to compete.’” She talks about Sidney Poitier becoming the first black man to win the best actor Oscar, representing generations of unrecognised predecessors.

But finally she admits, “Oh, it would be [the] ultimate dream. Yes! I would go back upstairs and get on my knees and pray for it.”

Can she talk me through the day of the ceremony? Is it March 15?

“Twelfth!” she mock-scolds. “The day will start like all days: I will wake up and do my exercises, because it clears my head, it preps my skin, it makes me glow from inside. Then my ‘glam team’ will come — hopefully I won’t be too nervous not to eat — and do the hair and make-up and all those kind of things. Then hop in the car” — she pauses for effect — “go to the event place, and bring the little gold man hooooome!”

Simon Kuper is an FT columnist

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter