by JOE RHODES
US Magazine
March 1998

Playing charming cops and honorable assassins made him one of Asia’s biggest stars. Now, with “The Replacement Killers,” some Hollywood big shots are betting he’ll be a hit man.

He first appears on the screen as a slow moving silhouette, a graceful shadow, heavily armed, gliding through a crowded Los Angeles nightclub, lights pulsing all around him, his stoic features revealed and then hidden with every strobe-lit footstep. He places a single bullet, its casing engraved with Chinese characters, on a table in front of a group of loud, drunken men, and then, like a Cossack drawing a sword, he pulls a Beretta from his waistband and begins to open fire. Before The Replacement Killers’ opening credits have finished, he has already murdered five men.

It’s quite an entrance, even for Chow Yun Fat.

After more than a decade of Hong Kong action hits that have made him a cinematic icon in Asia, Chow has finally come to Hollywood. And more than a few heavy hitters-including TriStar Pictures, Oliver Stone and Chow’s old Hong Kong mentor John Woo - are betting that Chow’s beguiling combination of sly charm and double-barreled bravado will make him as popular here as he is in Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan.

“He’s like a Chinese Cary Grant,” says Antoine Fuqua, director of The Replacement Killers, Chow’s first American movie. The 42-year-old actor plays the type of character that made him famous - a professional assassin who, because he refuses to carry out a morally reprehensible assignment, finds that other assassins have been hired to eliminate him. With the reluctant assistance of a street-smart document forger (Mira Sorvino), he vanquishes the army of hit men in plenty of time to catch a plane back to China.

“He’s handsome, he’s graceful, and there’s no question he will become a household name here if people don’t stereotype him because he’s a Chinese actor,” Fuqua says. “If we take care of him and put him in the right roles, he’s gonna be amazing, a real treasure.”

The Replacement Killers is the first wave of what promises to be a high-profile campaign to establish Chow Yun-Fat as not only a household name but the first Asian actor to succeed as a non-kung-fu-fighting Hollywood leading man. Chow will soon begin shooting The Corruptor, co-starring Mark Wahlberg. After that, he will re-team with Woo - who directed Chow’s biggest hits before making his mark in Hollywood as the director of Broken Arrow and Face-Off - in a caper film called King’s Ransom.

“What’s the big deal about being an actor?” Chows says, shrugging off the praise. “People try to say that an actor has a special quality, star charm. I don’t believe this. It’s a normal job. I am a normal guy.”

We are having dim sum, a traditional Cantonese meal, in the dining room of Hong Kong’s Peninsula hotel, just down the hall from the hotel camera shop, where 25 years ago Chow used to work. In the corridors, people greet him as if he’s an old friend who has been gone for a while. Bellboys and waiters grab his arm and touch his shoulder, and he lingers just long enough to make each one feel as if they’ve made some kind of special connection.

“I think, for people in Hong Kong, Yun-Fat is more like a big brother than a star,” Chow says as we move into the manic streets of his hometown. “They never run at me, they never scream. They always pay me respect. Because they have known me for a long time.”

In fact, Chow has been a familiar face in Hong Kong for nearly a quarter century, beginning when he was a 19-year-old contract player for Hong Kong’s TVB television station.

Born on Lamma Island, one of Hong Kong’s least-developed outlying islands, Chow grew up surrounded by fishermen and farms. His father worked on oil tankers and was often gone for months, sometimes years, at a time. Chow’s mother, raising four kids by herself (Chow has an older brother and two sisters), sold dim sum to fishermen in the mornings and worked in the fields every afternoon.

When Chow was 10, his mother moved the family to the high-rise tenements of Hong Kong’s Kowloon district, one of the most densely populated urban pockets in the world. (Chow’s father, insisting that he would die on the island of his birth, refused to go.) At 17, Chow dropped out of school and began scrambling from one odd job to another, working in factories and offices and as a messenger, a bellboy, and a postal worker. A friend encouraged him to answer an ad for TVB’s yearlong actor’s training program, and after surviving two auditions and paying a $35 entrance fee, Chow was accepted.

“For me it was like going to a technical school,” he says. “I was trying to learn a trade.”

Maybe it was his height (6-foot-1) or his sleepy Robert Mitchum eyes, but Chow soon found himself moving from background actor to leading man, a gossip-column mainstay so closely watched that in 1982 when he was admitted to a hospital with stomach pains, the papers speculated that he’d attempted suicide because of “an unhappy love affair.” It turned out to be food poisoning.

Successful as he was on television, Chow’s first attempts at a movie career failed miserably. Then he met John Woo, who in 1986 was looking to make a new kind of Hong Kong film. “He told me,” Chow says, remembering their first conversation, “that he was looking for a knight.”

“Hong Kong needed a new kind of hero,” Woo says of the 1986 film A Better Tomorrow, which propelled him and Chow to international renown. “The young people, they were kind of a lost generation, and a lot of people had lost their morality and values. They needed to see someone who was about friendship and family and honor. In his real life, Chow Yun-Fat stood for all those things.”

Woo and Chow became the Scorsese and DeNiro of Hong Kong. Their films together - Once A Thief, The Killer and the most popular of all, 1992’s Hard Boiled - made them the darlings of the film-festival circuit. Woo moved to Hollywood full time five years ago. There was pressure on Chow to follow, but he didn’t start spending significant time in the U.S. until 1994. “I needed time to prepare,” he says. He studied English, secured an agent and reveled in the relative anonymity of life in L.A. He and his wife, Jasmine, whom he married in 1986, rented an apartment in Westwood.

Wherever Chow goes, Jasmine is likely to be at this side. All negotiations, from movie deals to interview requests, go through her. And she’s not afraid to correct him when he gets some details wrong.

“I think we were married in 1988,” Chow says.

”No,” says Jasmine, joining us in the hotel restaurant. “1986.”

“Really? ’86?”

“Don’t put that question mark in your mind,” she says. “It was 1986.” It’s more a tease than a reprimand, and even as Chow bows his head like a shamed schoolboy, he is grinning.

Enticed as he is by America, (“American people, they know how to enjoy their life; Hong Kong people work eight days a week”), Chow says he will never leave his homeland. He would miss the rhythm of the crowded streets, the spectacular harbor framed by skyscrapers, the long walks he takes every morning to the top of Kowloon Peak, where he can look out over the entirety of Hong Kong, from Kowloon to the New Territories, all the way to mainland China.

“If someone wants me to carry two guns in Hollywood for another ten years, I’ll be glad to do it,” says Chow. “But one day, the audience is going to go, ‘Yun-Fat, that’s enough.’”

If that happens, he says he will go without complaint. “It’s a very challenging moment for me, to work in Hollywood,” Chow says. “It has been one of my fantasies. But I am a very traditional man, and I appreciate my life here. I would never abandon Hong Kong.”

“The people know that he is doing it for them,” Jasmine says when asked if anyone in Kowloon ever accuses her husband of going Hollywood. “So they are happy for him. They are proud that he is doing well. He makes all of Hong Kong proud.”

©1998 US Magazine. All rights reserved.