written by PAUL MALCOLM
Detour Magazine
February 1998

When Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-Fat first entered the offices of Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, the production company behind his first American movie, The Replacement Killers, his arrival caused quite a stir in the mailroom. For more than a decade, Chow, with his dazzling smile, infinite aplomb, and expressive eyes, has been the most bankable leading man in Asia. But in America he’s still a cult figure, known mostly for the ultra-tough but complex anti-heroes he plays in the over-the-top crime thrillers of directors John Woo (Hard-Boiled, The Killer) and Ringo Lam (City on Fire, Full Contact). Chow’s stateside fans may be relatively few - though you can count Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone among them - but they’re almost always totally devoted to the man the Los Angeles Times Magazine declared “the coolest actor in the world.” Which is why 10 young denizens of Brillstein-Grey’s mailroom blew their own cools and left their posts to catch a glimpse of the legend in their midst. “We’ve got Brad Pitt, Nic Cage, Christian Slater, Adam Sandler, and Chris Farley walking through our offices every day,” says Matthew Baer, an executive producer on The Replacement Killers, but they all came out to see Chow Yun-Fat.”

Of course, when the 42-year old Chow is compared to Anglo actors, it isn’t Pitt, Cage, or Slater who are mentioned, it’s names from the pantheon of Hollywood masculinity, guys like McQueen, Eastwood, Gable, Grant, Clift, and even Denzel Washington. Like all great big-screen icons, with a minimum of fuss Chow can connect with an audience like lightning striking a tree.

Whether he’s playing a Dirty Harry-style rogue cop or a Jean-Pierre Melville-inspired hitman, he brings a level of humanity to his characters that has almost disappeared from Hollywood genre films. With a defining gesture or piercing glance, he draws out the emotional conflict of men wracked by conscience and bound by loyalty in a violent world that regularly tests the limits of both. And of course, he wears the accouterments of cool - the matchstick wedged into the corner of the mouth, the flowing overcoat, the automatic weapon - like they’re natural extensions of his being.

With over 70 films under his belt, ranging from serious historical dramas (The Story of Woo Viet) to exuberant comedies (Eighth Happiness), Chow is also as versatile an actor as they come. In total control of his long, lean frame, he’s as agile doing light physical comedy as he is at suffering the hero’s rite of physical pain. And, as is often required in the genre-bending cinema of Hong Kong, he can effortlessly blend both in the same movie. Even when he’s delivering a fart gag, as in the international caper Once a Thief, he does it with an irresistibly boyish charm.

The Replacement Killers director, Antoine Fuqua, describes Chow’s magnetism in almost metaphysical terms. “You can see his soul in his face,” he says. “It’s a rare thing. Even when you see him blasting away with two guns you can feel that he’s a new kind of hero, and people want to root for him.”

Which is just the sort of thing Hollywood likes to cash in on. The studios have been courting Chow for years now, hoping he can work his magic on American audiences like no other Asian leading man since the exotic silent-screen idol Sessue Hayakawa. Since 1993, the projects reported to be waiting for him - some of which now look like realities - have stacked up like air traffic at Christmas, including: The Corruptor, co-starring Mark Wahlberg and to be directed by James Foley; a remake of the musical The King and I being developed at Fox; a script written by Tarantino specifically for Chow that’s being kept under tight wraps; and a long-awaited reunion with Woo. Chow, however, took his time in choosing a script for his American debut (he has a healthy, patient attitude toward change, taking even Hong Kong’s return to China in stride: “Everything will be fine,” he says on the subject). Relying, as always, on the advice and encouragement of Jasmine, his business manager and wife of 10 years, Chow finally settled on The Replacement Killers.

In the film, Chow play John Lee, a guilt-ridden Beijing hitman who illegally immigrates to Los Angeles to escape his terrible past, only to find himself pulled back into the underworld when he’s forced to accept one last assignment from a Triad kingpin. But when Lee decides to prevent the murder he was supposed to commit, he and a document forger, played by Mira Sorvino, are thrown into a maelstrom of violence. Lee is familiar ground for Chow. “It’s very close to what I’ve done with the John Woo movies,” he says. “Everything is based on his conscience. It’s a good way to present myself to the American audience.”

About a third of the way through the 60-day Killers shoot, if Chow is feeling the pressure of reaching a larger audience or living up to his fans’ expectations in his first English-language film, he isn’t showing it. Between takes amidst the elegant, Occidental vibe of the Ennis-Brown House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and nestled on a hillside high above Los Angeles, Chow jokes around with his dialogue coach, Judi Dickerson. Several months before the shoot, while Chow was still living in Hong Kong, Dickerson gave him a three-week crash course in American diction, with Chow getting up at 4:30 a.m. every day to work on his exercises. The pair still regularly confer on the set, but at the moment, they’re talking about the dictionary of slang Dickerson gave to Chow to help him make sense of the colloquialisms. When asked if he has a favorite idiomatic expression, Chow, in fluid, confident English, immediately replies, “a roll in the hay.” He and Dickerson start laughing as if some inside joke has been shared, but just as quickly Chow turns a shade of red, a little embarrassed at his risque choice. He offers another favorite, “straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Such ingratiating shyness and lightheartedness is at considerable odds with the atmosphere of sophisticated corruption being created on the set as Fuqua and his crew prep the pivotal scene in which Lee learns the identity of the person he’s supposed to rub out. But then again, Chow, the person, regularly contradicts the image of Chow, the tough-guy, Chow the superstar. “I don’t want to be like my character after the director says cut,” he says. “I won’t talk to you like that. I treat myself like an actor, not a star. I think Chow Yun-Fat is the kind of person you can relate to every day.”

Chow is often quoted as saying that, at heart, he’s just a poor country boy. He was born on Lamma, a small rural island off Victoria Harbor, and grew up working on his parents’ farm until they moved to the Kowloon section of Hong Kong. At 17, Chow left school and ran through a series of odd jobs until a friend encouraged him to answer a newspaper ad for acting traineeships at TVB, a major Hong Kong television station. He was accepted even though his only experience with the entertainment business was attending festivals staged by the Cantonese Opera as a child and watching American movies (his favorite to this day is still The Godfather). After 12 months as an actor in training, Chow signed a 14-year contract with TVB and he began working on a variety of programs, from comedies to soap opera to talk shows. But it was his role as a smooth-talking gangster in the popular series Shanghai Beach, in the early ‘80s, that first brought the small-town kid fame and all its ensuing troubles.

“When I was getting popular I had a hard time dealing with the media because you’re young, not very experienced, and there was this feeling that you’d kind of lost your mind,” he says. “But a few years later I figured it out. ‘Is this the real Chow Yun-Fat? Is this his life?’ Once I quit the television station I went back to normal. I started taking the subway and the buses.”

Indeed, one of the aspects of Chow’s personality that makes him “the coolest actor in the world” is that he’s also a regular guy. On the set of The Replacement Killers, he consistently converses with everyone around him, doling out hugs right and left. If the production ever falls behind schedule, Chow will lend a hand moving wires or pulling a dolly into position. Chow made his biggest impression, however, before the production even began when he and Jasmine took the whole crew out to dinner. “It’s never happened in Hollywood,” says Fuqua. “They took everybody from the PAs to the set decorator to the studio heads, and they paid for everything. I would be lucky to get that sort of treatment again.”

“I pay them very high respects because they’re the ones that make my dreams come true,” Chow says. “Without every single worker on the set I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

When sitting down and talking to a reporter, Chow leans in close, speaking softly. He’s a soothing presence who’ll place a friendly hand on your shoulder or knee when he has something important to say. “I like associating with people,” says the leading man who’s known in Hong Kong for doing his own shopping and walking the streets without an army of bodyguards. Since moving to Los Angeles, Chow and his wife have found it easy to continue their daily lives in public, trekking across town from Century City to get dim sum in Chinatown or searching out the best place for sushi in Westwood. “It’s interesting that people don’t recognize me,” he says. “I have a lot of freedom, I enjoy the food, the atmosphere. I enjoy the air here, it’s better than in Hong Kong. Mostly I enjoy hiking, it’s kind of my hobby. Every Sunday I go for a two-hour hike in Temescal Canyon or Topanga. I prefer to go near the open side so I can have the city view and the ocean view. And when the wind blows it’s very fresh.”

It’s closing in on midnight on Friday, a few weeks after the Ennis-Brown shoot, and at the end of a neon-lit alley behind the Alexandria Hotel in downtown Los Angeles - a place that has probably seen more than its share of real-like violence - Chow stands on the hood of a bullet-riddled Cadillac, handguns blazing. Towering above everything but the flanking buildings and the camera crane behind him, a slight breeze rippling the tattered gray suit, his brows sternly furrowed above righteous eyes, he looks like a street-wise avenging god.

The scene is part of the fiery climax of The Replacement Killers, and moments before, Chow was waiting on the car hood with his palms open and empty at his sides, swaying hypnotically back and forth, as if trying to stir something up inside himself. When a crew member handed him the sleek weapons to complete the picture, he took them in his hands, measured their weight, aimed them at the windshield, and a broad smile broke over his face. Chow knows this is the image, the look, that everyone involved in the $26-million production is there for, and he can’t help but be amused.

“A few nights ago, I shot 506 rounds from two guns,” he says, revealing the bandages on his two index fingers before adding that it shattered his old record of 300 rounds in one day for John Woo’s Hard-Boiled. “By tomorrow morning, I’ll be able to use my chopsticks again.” He grins.

It was Woo who, in 1986, first put a pair of guns in Chow’s hands and made the image stick. The film was A Better Tomorrow, Chow and Woo’s first out-of-the-ballpark hit. “John Woo taught me how to perform like that,” Chow says. “He knew. He used slow-motion and different angles to treat me like a professional killer, so more or less he is one of my gods, he created my character.”

For Chow, being able to participate in the creation of John Lee’s persona was one of the things that drew him to the project. Before officially committing to it, he spent long hours with Columbia Pictures executive Teddy Zee, producer Matthew Baer, and screenwriter Ken Sanzel developing Lee’s personal history. The discussions sometimes proved to be keen lessons in Hollywood movie-making and marketing.

“Even though I play an illegal emigrant from China, they still wanted to put me in a good jacket,” Chow says. “Some people were very, very demanding about putting me in very good shape to make it easy to sell Mr. Chow Yun-Fat as a Hong Kong Cary Grant or Hong Kong James Bond.”

Is he happy with that kind of image? “Yeah, it’s fine,” he says. “With the marketing they’ll handle it much better than me: they know the audience, what the American people love about me. So everything for me is yes, yes. You have to give and take and balance it between the studio and your performance.”

When it comes to whether or not that balance will pay off in terms of Chow’s rising American star, the actor chooses to hedge his bets. “We’ll have to wait and see after this movie comes out and then I can tell how famous I am,” he says. “Every movie, from my experience, is like going to Vegas. Not every time you’re going to hit seven.” According to Baer it isn’t necessarily luck that will determine Chow’s success. “If there’s ever a kind of show-biz karma where you want good people to succeed, Chow defines that because his work ethic is fantastic and people like him.” In other words, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

©1998 Detour Magazine. All rights reserved.