When Butts Need Kicking
Michelle Yeoh's happy to oblige
by Judith Lewis
"I don't do sit-ups when I'm brushing my teeth!" Michelle Yeoh insists, dismissing that bit of apocrypha as if nothing were more absurd than a bathroom workout. It's not the idea she objects to. It's the specifics: "I do my kicks when I'm brushing my teeth," she corrects. "It's great for control, because your upper body stays straight, so you know you're training your leg muscles, your back and stomach muscles all at the same time." Sit-ups, she says, are for the car: She demonstrates abdominal contractions so subtle you can barely tell she's moving. "If I'm on the set reading a book I'll do leg lifts, and when I have the time I'll get out a chair and do press-ups.
"I work out like that throughout the whole day," explains Yeoh, who's been touring on behalf of the new Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, since November. In tailored brown stretch pants and a knit turtleneck, she looks luxuriously well-prepared for such stolen calisthenics. "I stretch all the time too: If I knew you better I'd have my legs out here like this" - she spreads her arms wide, illustrating how she'd be in a side-split across the sofa in the Peninsula Hotel's plush bar. "But then again," she reconsiders, "that might look too, you know, Jean-Claude Van Damme."
It's an interesting choice for comparison. A little over a year ago, a story started circulating among Hong Kong cinephiles suggesting that Yeoh and alleged wife-beater Van Damme once had an encounter. Seems when they met at a dinner party in Hong Kong, Van Damme wrote his room number on a matchbook, passed it to Yeoh, and requested that she visit around 11 p.m. Yeoh, the story goes, made a few phone calls, and secured a proxy: A transvestite who was only too happy to introduce herself as Michelle.
"Where'd you hear that?" Yeoh asks, a little alarmed. I tell her: from a writer who adores her. "Oh," she says with pretend gravity. "He's a naughty, naughty boy."
"But is it true?"
"Well," she says, pausing to ponder the repercussions. Yeoh's Hollywood debut as Pierce Brosnan's right-hand woman has stirred a buzz; she's already lined up for interviews with Howard Stern and David Letterman. The spell she's cast on Hong Kong audiences for the last decade seems likely to translate to the U.S. mainstream. Maybe now's the right time for a racy little story to leak into the media.
"Let's just say," she says with a coy smile, "that I like to give people what they deserve."
At press time, Van Damme could not be reached for comment.
Onscreen, the 100-pound, 5-foot-4-inch, 2 percent body-fatted Yeoh has been giving her adversaries what they deserve since 1985, when, on the set of her second movie, Yes, Madam, she persuaded directors Brandy Yen and Arthur Wong to let her character fight back against the movie's hostage-taking brutes with her fists. A lifelong athlete and ballerina (she holds a degree in dance), Yeoh began studying martial arts that year, working out with the stunt coordinator and spending long days observing workouts at the gym. "They did try to test me out a few times," she remembers. "They'd just say, 'Oh, we want you to roll across the floor there and sidesweep this guy,' and they wouldn't tell me how it was done. I'd be standing there going, 'How the hell do I roll across the floor and sidesweep some guy?'"
Nevertheless in Yes, Madam, Yeoh managed to perform the stunt that launched her career. "I'm sitting on this balcony with glass all around it when these two guys come at me with knives," she explains. "And I go backward - right through the glass, get them by the legs and hoist them down." In the stunt world, she says, "That put me on the map."
It was the first time in HK cinema history that a woman had asserted herself as a fighter. Yeoh was 22, fresh from a yearlong stint as Miss Malaysia; her only professional acting experience had been in a commercial alongside Jackie Chan, with whom she starred a few years ago in Police Story 3: Supercop. ("He's a dear friend," she says of Chan. "But such a klutz!") Everyone who worked on Yes, Madam was nervous about the risk.
"I swear with that premiere we were shitting bricks," says Yeoh. "Because we weren't quite sure how the audience would take it. But after that first fight sequence, the audience, they cheered. We realized we started a trend of how women should be looked at in Asian cinema." Which is not, she recognizes, an entirely good thing. "It's made life very painful for quite a few actresses," she admits, and there's little hope for relief anytime soon. "In the movies, I get to walk into a room full of guys and say, 'Hey, just come over here and let me kick your butt!' I mean, come on! How could I walk away from that?"
Copyright © 1997, Los Angeles Weekly, Inc. All rights reserved.
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