If you ever need a morale boost, I would recommend jumping on a call with Michelle Yeoh. The 60-year-old actor has a way of looking back on her career and any hurdles she’s had to overcome with such grace and positivity that it really does make you feel like you too can do anything.
Even when I ask her if there’s a project that got away, she admits that yes, there was—she won’t say which—but she hasn’t lingered on it. “That’s the balance in life. I don’t live in regret,” she says on Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast (listen to the full interview below). “You just have to move forward and move on and go, ‘I will try and find something else that I will love and have fun doing.’”
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Maybe it’s that glass-half-full attitude that allowed her to be open to taking on Everything Everywhere All at Once in the first place. She admits the film, written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known as the Daniels), was a risk. “It was something so wild and wonderful and wacky,” she says. “On paper when you read it, you go, ‘Hmm, either the Daniels are certifiably insane, or if they’re not, I’m also in for a heck of a crazy ride.’”
A crazy ride in more ways than one. The film follows her character, Evelyn Wang, an overworked laundromat owner and mother, who is thrown into a frantic adventure through multiple universes in order to save the world from destruction. It required Yeoh to not only play real-world Evelyn but also dozens of different versions of her character—ranging from a martial artist turned movie star to a teppanyaki chef to a woman with, yes, hot dog fingers. The action scenes allow Yeoh to display her incredible abilities as a martial artist, but it’s her emotional grounding through those wild situations that has catapulted her into the best-actress Oscar race, an unlikely outcome for a film that includes martial arts, googly eyes, and butt plugs. Says Yeoh, “I guess my 40 years of experience was like a long rehearsal for this movie.”
When we first meet Evelyn, she’s weighed down by an ongoing audit of her laundromat and her strained relationship with her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Playing Evelyn was quite a transformation for the effortlessly chic Yeoh, a fashion icon and former beauty pageant queen who carries herself with the posture of a classically trained ballerina. “Michelle Yeoh walks very straight, but Evelyn Wang is like this,” says Yeoh, hunching over and becoming seemingly much smaller in an instant. Her wardrobe was that of someone living on a shoestring budget, and she added in gray streaks to her hair. “You need to see that she has no time because the first impression you have of her is that this woman is weighed down by responsibilities,” she says.
At its core, Everything Everywhere All at Once is about the complicated relationship between a mother and her child, as Evelyn tries to connect (but often ends up criticizing) Joy. It’s a theme that Yeoh says is relatable for everyone, even her. “Regardless of what culture you come from, mothers are always telling you what to do,” Yeoh says. “I mean, even now when I go back, the first thing [my mother] will say is, ‘Oh, why is your hair so long? Why didn’t you cut it?’”
But in the end, after the multiverse jumps and the battle to save the universe, Everything Everywhere doesn’t wrap up Evelyn and Joy’s complicated relationship with any sort of tidy little bow. “It’s like we have to step back and say, ‘We want to be there for each other. We just don’t know how to express it yet, but let’s not give up on each other,’” she says.
She’s played a disapproving mother before, most recently in the 2018 box office hit Crazy Rich Asians. But as a Hong Kong action star who made the successful transition to Hollywood, Yeoh’s roles have often shown off her physical abilities, including two of her biggest movies, Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). And she gets to do plenty of that here too. But Everything Everywhere allows Yeoh to show off her range in a way we’ve never seen before. And, lucky for us, Yeoh is entering a busy period in her long career, with a slew of other projects in the works
“It has to be something that I’m convinced of because when I choose to say yes, it takes me away from the people I love, from my family,” she says of the projects she’s choosing to get involved with. Yeoh was recently seen in the recently released Netflix film The School for Good and Evil; her upcoming projects include the Disney+ series American Born Chinese, the next Transformers movie and Kenneth Branagh’s next Agatha Christie adaptation A Haunting in Venice, both slated for release in 2023. “A lot of the time, it’s the director because they are the ones with the vision. A script could be good, but if you don’t have a visionary, it’s just words on paper.”