Stunt work is physically intensive and at times, life-threatening.
And Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh, who rose to fame for her roles in Hong Kong action films, has seen her share of danger.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly for her upcoming film Everything Everywhere All At Once, the 59-year-old recounted a risky stunt on the 1992 film Supercop that almost killed her. In fact, she called it “the worst stunt [in that film] where we could have had a very tragic accident”.
Thankfully, fellow Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan saved her life.
She said: “In Asia at that time, we didn’t really do rehearsals, we didn’t have weeks of preparation. We learned the stunt and we did it.”
The stunt in question involved Michelle rolling off a moving truck onto the hood of Jackie’s oncoming convertible, smashing into the windscreen to break her fall, then rolling onto the road when Jackie brakes the car.
Michelle didn’t think too much of it at first until the stunt progressed and the vehicles were moving.
“You look at it and it’s about a six-foot fall, it’s not much, and you think, ‘I could do this.’ But once the two vehicles are moving you go, ‘Oh, wow, this is a completely different experience. I’m not standing still, the car isn’t, nothing is still.’
I don’t know whether it was crazy, a moment of insanity, [but] the thought that went through my head was, ‘You’re never going to know how it feels until you try it.'”
What went wrong, however, was that the windscreen didn’t shatter which caused her to slide off the car in the wrong direction.
She said: “I had nowhere to hold on to and I kept sliding off the car. And if you watch the outtakes, you can see Jackie panic. He can see me going off and I’m floundering; he reaches over and he literally just grabs me — luckily, I think he saved my head — by my shirt.”
Michelle slid off the car and landed on the road (“fortunately, I didn’t go head first,” she said) but a stuntman who came to her aid didn’t fare that well. He slipped off the car, suffered a bad concussion and was sent to the hospital.
Jackie wanted to call off the shoot, she recalled.
“He was like, ‘Okay, okay, that’s it! Enough! We are finished for the day! We’re not doing anymore! This is stupid! This is ridiculous! We’re not doing it!'”
However, director Stanley Tong approached her and quietly asked what she thought. The daring actress was game for a second take at the stunt.
She said: “You know when you fall off a horse? You jump back on right away. If we had stopped the shoot, gone away and thought about it, I wouldn’t have gone back up.”
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Though she was quite the daredevil those days, she confessed that she has questioned herself when she looked back on the stunts in Supercop.
Michelle exclaimed: “What was I thinking? I was swinging at the side of trucks. I was riding a motorcycle onto a moving train. I was doing the most insane stunts.”
Of course, this was the woman who proved to Jackie that women have a place in action films.
Now, she’s content to let the stunt professionals take over.
“I am not a stunt person, per se. I have to sometimes step back and say, ‘Please let the professionals do their job.’ I have to talk myself down,” she said.
This article was first published on AsiaOne and republished on theAsianparent with permission.
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