Let Go
“I would never have imagined that Ann
Hui would invite me to be in her film. This
is a great honour for me,” Peng told Chin-
aReport about his latest production Our Time
Will Come, a wartime film based on a true
story, directed by the award-winning Hong
Kong director Ann Hui, which focuses on
the resistance movement in Japanese-occu-
pied Hong Kong during WW2. Released on
July 1 on the Chinese mainland, the film was
branded as a “celebratory gift” for the 20th
anniversary of the Hong Kong handover.
This is the first time that Peng cooper-
ated with Hui, 70, the pioneer of the Hong
Kong New Wave film movement and one of
the most celebrated directors in Hong Kong
film history along with contemporaries such
as Wong Kar-wai and Tsui Hark. Hui has
produced a varied body of work that tackles
social issues in Hong Kong and the rest of
Asia with humanity and subtlety.
Peng played Blackie Lau, a legendary as-
sassin in the local resistance group who took
part in a mission to evacuate a group of in-
tellectuals from Hong Kong in 1942. Peng’s
eyes sparkled with excitement when talking
about the role.
“Playing this role was particularly challeng-
ing for me. I don’t look like a guerilla fighter
and can’t speak Cantonese at all. I couldn’t
get the hang of it to start,” Peng said. To pre-
pare for the role, Peng consumed three biog-
raphies of Blackie Lau to get a clearer image
of the outlaw hero.
To get closer to the historical figure of Lau,
Peng paid particular attention to the small-
est details. He insisted on a natural suntan to
darken his skin, instead of just using make-
up, and crafted fake muddy fingernails and
crooked teeth to be more convincing as the
legendary figure.
Filming Our Time Will Come, for Peng,
was a precious lesson in acting. “I am the
type who tends to think a lot when acting,
but sometimes thinking too much might re-
strain a performance. The director [Ann Hui]
often told me that ‘You can try another wayaround. It might be better if you think less,
relax a bit more and let go of yourself,’” Peng
told ChinaReport. The actor said that the big-
gest lesson he learnt from working with Hui
is that acting can be a relaxing process.
Compared to Blackie, playing Sun Wu-
kong, the most famous Chinese mythologi-
cal hero, brought the actor many more stress-
es and challenges.
Directed by Hong Kong director Derek
Kwok, Wukong is an action-fantasy that
tells the stories of the mythological monkey
Sun Wukong before he became the Monkey
King.
“He [Eddie Peng] is cool and dashing, and
there is also a touch of monkey-like cunning
in his looks. Since the film Wukong focuses
on the earlier stories of Sun Wukong before
he grows into the invincible Monkey King,
this protagonist must display a mixed per-
sonality as an adorable, unruly, obstinate but
vulnerable character. Eddie was the first actor
that came to mind whom I believed perfectly
matched the role,” Kwok told ChinaReport.
“Balancing Sun Wukong’s monkey nature
and his human nature is a subtle art,” Kwok
said. “We want to portray him like a human,
but remind our audiences of the fact he is still
a monkey.”
Peng said the biggest challenge by far was
to fit his interpretation of the role to that in
people’s heads. “Everyone has his or her own
Sun Wukong in mind,” said Peng. “He is
very powerful, rebellious and harbours a de-
sire for freedom.”
Three years ago, when Peng was invited to
play Sun Wukong, his friends tried to per-
suade him that playing such an iconic role
would mean setting up expectations that
were hard to meet. He encountered similar
objections when he chose to play the iconic
martial artist Wong Fei-hung in Rise of the
Legend (2014) and a competitive cyclist in
the sports film To the Fore (2015).
Peng described himself as “centred on him-
self ” when it comes to filming. “Honestly, I
don’t really care much about whether other
people think it is worthy or not. What’s im-portant is what I can learn from it. It’s pretty
subjective,” Peng told ChinaReport.No Desire, No Fear
Born in Taipei on March 24, 1982, Peng
grew up in a single-parent family and was
brought up by his grandmother, who was an
ardent cinemagoer and one of the most influ-
ential persons in his life.
Peng spent his childhood in the cinema
with his grandmother and became intoxi-
cated with the world he saw on screen. The
dashing Hong Kong actor Chou Yun-fat
was his grandmother’s favourite, but back
then Peng could never have imagined that he
would co-star with Chou, famous for his cool
gangster roles, in Cold War II (2016).
At the age of 13, his family moved to Van-
couver, where he later attended the Universi-
ty of British Columbia, majoring in econom-
ics, as his family had hoped. He described
the route he followed at that time as “Asian
stereotype” – a math-savvy Asian studying
business in a Western university, a rather safe
road that he hardly felt any passion for.
Peng’s fate took a sharp turn at the age of
19 when his beloved grandmother died in
the summer of his first university year. He
returned to Taiwan to arrange the funeral,
during which time TV director Yang Daqing
invited him to act in the drama, The White
Paper of Love (2002).
Peng said it was filming his second televi-
sion series, Scent of Love in 2003, that pro-
pelled him to seriously consider taking act-
ing as his career. The decision was inspired in
part by his granny’s love of cinema. He finally
decided to drop out of school and start up
acting, a ballsy choice given that the Chinese
entertainment industry was far from boom-
ing at that time.
When filming Scent of Love, Peng was
lucky enough to cooperate with Taiwanese
veteran actor Lau Chung-yan, who played
his father in the series. As a serious profes-
sional, Lau served as Peng’s mentor and held
acting classes for him, teaching him useful
Eddie Peng techniques, different postures and how to
Photo by Dong Jiexu