showdown. ‘‘The work she does,’’ Jamie Lee
Curtis, who plays a supporting role in the fi lm,
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 fi rst 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 fi rst time she’s been called
upon to loosen the elegance and poise that has
defi ned her career so far and let her own electric,
slightly neurotic personality slip through.
The fi lm 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, Way-
mond, 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 mar-
gin of fi nancial failure; a strained marriage to
Waymond; a daughter whose Americanized
feelings are illegible to her.
On top of all that, their business is being audit-
ed. 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 alter-
nate path where people have hot dogs for fi ngers).
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 fl agged 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 fl ower. She experiment-
ed with diff erent 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 fi nished, 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 fi ancé, Jean Todt, a longtime motor-
sports executive. We were sitting at a large table
in the penthouse suite of a hotel not far from her
Eighth Arrondissement home; she divides heryears into working as an action star, Michelle
Yeoh plummeted from an 18-foot overpass and
nearly ended her career. It was her fi rst role in a
character-driven drama, playing the lead in ‘‘The
Stunt Woman,’’ directed by Ann Hui, a promi-
nent fi lmmaker of the Hong Kong New Wave. The
script called for her to channel nearly a decade
of experience as a martial artist into the charac-
ter of Ah Kam, a stunt woman working her way
into the fi lm industry. This scene was crucial:
As Ah Kam hesitated over the performance of a
daunting on-camera stunt, the character played
by Sammo Hung, a legend of kung fu cinema ,
would push her, and she would fall over the ledge
onto the bed of a passing truck. ‘‘When it’s an
easy stunt,’’ Yeoh says, ‘‘that’s when things can
really go wrong.’’
There’s a certain way to protect yourself when
doing a stunt fall: You remain aware of both your
body and the layers of cushioning waiting to
receive you below, planning your landing as
you descend. Yeoh’s fi rst attempt at the stunt
went perfectly. But she had to shoot it again, so
the moment could be captured from a diff erent
perspective, and this time, instead of readying
herself for the impact, Yeoh was immersed in
her character’s reluctance and uncertainty. In
the United States, the scene might have been
shot with large, puff y airbags to pad her fall,
but in Hong Kong the norm was mattresses
and cardboard. Yeoh took a nosedive into the
assemblage below, where her head lodged
between two mattresses and her legs carried
the momentum past the axis of her spine. As
her torso folded in half, she felt her own legs
hit the back of her head.
‘‘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 diff erent modes of
fi lmmaking, 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 fi lms that priori-
tize psychological depth. Yeoh was being asked
to consolidate all that she knew about falling into
a character who knew much less — and bridging
the diff erence required a new sort of agility.
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 fi rst starring
role as a high-kicking police inspector in ‘‘Yes
Madam!’’ (1985), Yeoh has performed in doz-
ens of other action fi lms, from fast-paced Hong
Kong martial-arts fi lms to wuxia features — Chi-
nese 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 handcuff ed to Pierce Brosnan.
Over the years, Yeoh has cemented her image
as a self-assured combat expert, the serious and
confi dent counterpart to whoever is at her side.
In Ang Lee’s ‘‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’’
(2000), she soared across courtyards and roof-
tops while subtly articulating the feeling roiling
within the Qing dynasty warrior she played. As
the star of more character-focused fi lms like Luc
Besson’s ‘‘The Lady’’ (2011) as well as international
blockbusters like ‘‘Crazy Rich Asians’’ (2018), she
embodied refi ned 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 fi lm — Yeoh draws from previously
unknown emotional and comedic reserves, bring-
ing the full force of her physicality to the portray-
al of a middle-aged woman whose ordinariness
makes her the focus of a grand, multiversal24 3.20.22
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