Yeoh in ‘‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’’ (2022),
a starring role written exclusively for her.what drew her to ‘‘Everything Everywhere All
at Once’’ is that she wanted to tell more stories
about people the audience could feel for.
What’s especially startling is the vulnerability
Yeoh brings to off -kilter action sequences, with
characters unused to combat. When Evelyn tries
to fi ght for the fi rst time, in the I.R.S. offi ce, she has
no special abilities: She punches a nemesis, and
her fi st crumples; she pulls her hand back and cra-
dles it against her chest. But when, at last, she suc-
ceeds in employing a high-tech earpiece that lets
her channel the martial-artist version of Evelyn,
she is fl ooded with expertise. She turns toward
the fi ght, her eyes expressing bewilderment but
her body demonstrating honed skill. Her fi ngers
extend toward the camera in an open-palmed,
defensive position, their tips trembling. Having
previously turned movement into an ideal, almost
abstract form, Yeoh is now bringing it back to the
specifi c — a particular aging, female, Asian body
housing a human being with complex emotions.
The effect is liberating, cathartic; it feels
as if Yeoh, this Swiss Army knife of actors, has
unleashed in herself the ability to inhabit each of
her diverse modes of performance simultaneously
— to be everything all at once — as she stakes claim
over a space that has traditionally been designatedreturning to the screen just recently. Having once
watched Yeoh act alongside other legends of Hong
Kong cinema, he found himself looking to her for
guidance as they fi lmed. ‘‘And she is just this amaz-
ing, generous, very giving, very patient person.’’
It was rigorous, nonstop work, fi lmed large-
ly in an offi ce building in California’s Simi Val-
ley, leaving little time to rehearse. Yeoh had to
improvise, testing out various approaches in real
time. Embodying Evelyn also meant shedding a
certain amount of hard-earned expertise. Back
at the Paris suite’s dining room, Yeoh stood as
she told me about fi guring out how her charac-
ter might inhabit her body — a slightly stooped
shuff le with her hands held low but not hang-
ing. From that off -kilter center of gravity came
Evelyn’s way of scolding, fi ghting, even dancing:
index fi ngers up, poking lightly at the air. Yeoh put
her hands up in tight little fi sts, the wrists bent at
an amateur’s angle. She had to relearn to fi ght in
a way that showed Evelyn’s body language and
inexperience, she told me. At fi rst, she said, the
Daniels kept telling her: ‘‘Don’t do it too well.
That’s looking too good!’’
In one sense, the character was familiar to
Yeoh. ‘‘If I go into Chinatown or whatever, you
see these housewives or mothers who are there,’’
she said, ‘‘who are so frazzled because they’re
trying to keep the family, and all they do is go and
do the shopping, the grocery shopping, then they
have to go home and clean.’’ After Yeoh played
the matriarch in ‘‘Crazy Rich Asians,’’ people told
her that her performance helped them better
understand their own mothers-in-law; part of
for the celebration of young, muscular, male bod-
ies. We feel her exhaustion in her shuff ling gait, but
also the thrill of that same body spinning sharply
to block a strike. ‘‘There’s a calcifi cation that takes
place as we get older,’’ Jamie Lee Curtis says, ‘‘and
I mean literally, you get your bones, your arthritis
— it’s all calcifi cation, all hardening. The hardening
of the arteries, the heart.’’ Ideas, too, can harden
— ‘‘binary, rigid, calcifi ed imprints of our parents
and our ancestors’’ — she continues. ‘‘Our jobs as
human beings is to break free of them and create
new ideas, and the Daniels, through the brilliance
of Michelle Yeoh, have done so.’’AS SHE HAS grown older, Yeoh has given up doing
some of the stunts that she blithely attempted
when she was still proving herself — and when
she watches her early fi lms, she thinks of all that
could have gone wrong. ‘‘We knew that we could
do it, and we did it,’’ she said. ‘‘I swear, sometimes
I look at a movie and go: Oh, my God. What the
hell was I thinking then?’’ At one point, I asked
whether she still remembered how to fi ght with
the ancient weapons she used in ‘‘Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon,’’ and she got to her feet and
began lunging, thrusting an imaginary weapon.
The key when mastering a new one, she said, is
to spend time before the scene carrying it around
everywhere, moving it constantly, making it an
extension of your body. Wielding the pizzeria
advertising sign she used for one of Evelyn’s alter-
nate lives as a sign-spinner, for example, was ‘‘a
little bit like using a spear, except it’s wider.’’
She had me follow her to the bathroom, where
she did several pull-ups while gripping the
overhanging edge of a marble doorway, transi-
tioned to an ethereal sequence of tai-chi-inspired
motions she learned for ‘‘Shang-Chi’’ and then
moved into a series of deep squats while miming
brushing her teeth in the bathroom’s mirror.
The routine was a little bit daff y — a wuxia
grandmaster with a hint of Lucille Ball. It was
also strikingly original, a spontaneous yet fl uid
choreography that turned the surfaces of this
fancy hotel room into a jungle gym. It showed
how Yeoh’s body has stored all the diff erent forms
of expertise that it has absorbed, all the injuries
and victories, and metabolized them into deep
bodily wisdom. As she spoke, she casually execut-
ed a famous kick that I had seen her do countless
times to knock out someone directly behind her —
fl inging her leg up until it was completely vertical.
She repeated it again and again, switching from
one leg to the other, until it seemed more like an
ecstatic dance, light and free and frictionless.The New York Times Magazine 27