Michelle Yeoh On Being Cast In ‘Wicked’ & Why The Film Industry Needs To Create More Opportunities For Women & Diverse Storytelling: “I Kicked My Way Into Shattering The Glass Ceiling” — Red Sea

deadline.com:

Michelle Yeoh has been involved in two of the biggest Asian success stories at the Oscars in the last 25 years – Ang Lee’s legendary title Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won four Oscars in 2001, and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won seven in 2023, including a Best Actress award for Yeoh.

But the prolific Malaysian-born actress said that these success stories are few and far between and encouraged gatekeepers of the entertainment industry to get better at promoting equal opportunities for storytellers. “I think it’s crucial for the involvement of our industry to create more opportunities – equal opportunities – for storytellers to be able to tell their own stories in their own ways,” she said during a wide-ranging conversation at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia on Friday.

Yeoh revealed that the main role of the middle-aged Chinese immigrant in Everything Everywhere All at Once was originally supposed to be played by Jackie Chan. “They wrote it for a guy,” she said. “To be able to finance a movie like that, it’s easier.”   When Chan didn’t board the project, Yeoh said the filmmakers “threw the script away and said, “What is the most important thing we face?

Our mothers!” The film, which was budgeted at $25M and went on to surpass $140M at the global box office, was a prime example of an original idea supported by distributor A24, that proved that risks and original storytelling can glean critical and commercial results.  “If we don’t take risks, we’re not going to come into something like Everything Everywhere All at Once,” said Yeoh. “We take risks with big movies that flop, so why can’t we take risks with small movies?” The actress, who can