![]() And let me admit that I kind of went, “Ohh, I can’t believe he said that out loud,” when you responded to comments about the Shang-Chi release strategy being an experiment. It’s so important to take up space and to be frank, especially as a minority. So yeah, I guess you could say it’s a part of who I am. There was definitely a lot of rebellion, a lot of me trying to fight for, you know, just being able to go out and see my friends. It goes back to being as argumentative with my parents as I was in my teenage years. Um, yeah, you know, I tweet a lot, I speak a lot. I hope you won’t mind if I said that you’re a pretty outspoken guy. Review: What’s the best part of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings? Hint: It’s not Shang-Chi Maybe it was a big machine and I would just be told, “You’re a small cog, so just fit and stand there and say that and that’s all you have to do.” But thankfully that very much wasn’t the case. It was honestly pleasantly surprising because I had all sorts of preconceptions going in. I was asked right from Day 1, what are my thoughts on this story? What are my thoughts on where the characters go? Is there anything that I can contribute with my experience? That role was very famously taken away from Bruce Lee, one of my absolute idols.įrom our producers Kevin Feige and Jonathan Schwartz, I think there was a real understanding of the limitations of their perspective and then having the humility and maybe the wisdom to know when to step aside. Kung Fu of course was a TV show starring David Carradine, who was not Asian. ![]() Shang-Chi was conceived in the 1970s in the midst of this Kung Fu craze that swept the nation. From Day 1, meeting with Destin Daniel Cretton, who is Asian-American, and Dave Callaham, who is also Asian-American and one of the scribes, it was very clear to me that they knew what needed to be done to bring this character into 2021 in a way that completely and utterly destroyed anything tropey or stereotypical there could have been.Īnd to be fair, there could have been many. I can only speak to my personal experience working for this studio, which was absolutely phenomenal. Do more money and support help fix systemic problems when it comes to diversity and representation? Now you’ve been able to work with one of the biggest studios in the world. We know you’ve been critical of your experience on Kim’s. ![]() Looking up and down the cast and crew – you, Awkwafina and Tony Leung and everyone, your director Destin Daniel Cretton and the stunt co-ordination – you had such an inclusive production. I think the key to all of that is representation all around. That’s when you’re going to start to see the end of tokenism, this idea that diversity is reflected by one character in an otherwise pretty homogeneous cast. When the gates open and Asian storytellers or minority storytellers are able to make decisions like casting, make greenlight decisions on projects – I feel like that’s when you’re gonna start to get the most nuanced kinds of representation. I think on-screen representation and off-screen representation are equally important. I just want to make sure that every actor that plays every role is able to do so. Are we at a point yet, in North American cinema, that there are enough projects and roles for Asians, where we’re not cast interchangeably to play Vietnamese, to play Korean, to play Chinese? And now with Shang-Chi, you’re finally acclaimed for a fully Chinese character. On that representation tip: Pan-Asian is still important at this point, but on Kim’s, you were known for playing a Korean character. We’re really excited to be bringing that to the world now. It would have meant the world to me to have a hero through which I could see myself, my experiences, my culture. I knew that I didn’t look like Batman or Spider-Man or Captain America. But as a kid, even though I appreciated and admired that world of superheroes, I never quite saw myself in there, because I knew that I didn’t look like Superman. ![]() I actually had no idea who Shang-Chi was, he’s a little bit more obscure. ![]()
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