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American Born Chinese: Daniel Wu on Finally Teaming With Michelle Yeoh, Badlands Comps and Dr. Zaius Vibes

Matt Webb Mitovich
·2 min read

The following Q&A ends with well-labeled spoilers from the American Born Chinese season finale.

In Disney+’s American Born Chinese (now streaming all eight episodes), Daniel Wu traveled from postapocalyptic Badlands to a mythological Heaven lorded over by his Monkey King aka Sun Wukong.

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For his role as a powerful pop struggling to rein in a rebellious son (played by Jimmy Liu), Wu got to explore a fresh take on the Monkey King of lore, while also relishing the opportunity to at long last work with longtime friend (and recently minted Oscar winner) Michelle Yeoh.

TVLine spoke with Wu about the, um, hairier aspects of his role, what made the fight scenes special, the burden carried by Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan’s character, and more. (Again, any finale spoilers are at the end, and are well-marked.)

TVLINE | What excited you most about this opportunity?
A couple of things. One is doing something that my daughter could watch and be proud of. Like, [Into the] Badlands is definitely not something a 9-year-old can watch, and even my previous stuff she’s not really interested in watching. This was something that she was excited about and could be proud of and brag about to her friends. For most of my life, that didn’t matter to me, but now it kind of does. I’m trying to impress my daughter! So that was part of it.

And then working with Michelle [Yeoh, as the goddess Gaunyin] definitely was one of the reasons to be a part of it, because we had known each other for so long and tried to work together a lot of times and this was finally an opportunity for us to do that.

Also, this is a very different type of Monkey King than most people are used to from Journey to the West. To see him in a more subdued, kind of regal, fatherly kind of perspective, as someone who’s stressed out as a father, made it more real for me and more interesting. It was a take that I’ve never seen before.

Yeoh and Wu (Disney+) - Credit: Disney+
Yeoh and Wu (Disney+) - Credit: Disney+

Disney+

TVLINE | How did you and Michelle first meet?
In our days in Hong Kong. Obviously my career started there, and she started in Hong Kong as well. Since 2000 we’ve known each other, and there were like two or three projects that we almost worked on together. And we run into each other all the time at, like, film events and the Hong Kong Film Awards, those kinds of things. But we never really worked together until this.

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