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Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV
Tom Wood
Hollywood can be a tough place for women who want to take on action-based roles, and that once led to an awkward moment between David Letterman and Michelle Yeoh on late-night TV. You can see the whole cringeworthy situation unfold below:
This whole thing took place back in 1997, but has since gone viral again for whatever reason, and contains an interesting exchange between the host of the show and Yeoh about her fellow actor and action star Jackie Chan.
Now, it seems as if the pair are – or certainly were – friends, but they clearly differ on what the role of women in the workplace is.
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Yeoh is known for her work in high-octane movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and more recently Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, but on this occasion she was on to discuss her role in James Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies.
Appearing on Late Night with David Letterman, she was asked about whether Jackie Chan was the reason that she decided to get into the action genre.
Without much of a pause, Yeoh responded: “No, actually he’s a male chauvinistic pig.
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“Jackie and I are very good friends – I say this to his face.
“He always believes that women should stay at home and cook and don’t do anything and be the victim.”
She then added: “Except for Michelle, now he says – because I would kick his butt.”
Well, that settles that then.
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The host laughed it off, but it was clearly a bit of an uncomfortable moment for him.
As we’ve covered – it does seem as if the comments might have been at least slightly in jest, given that Chan and Yeoh are friends.
Even at the age of 60 now, she still performs stunts as part of her acting repertoire, and just last year took on some – admittedly lighter – combat work in Shang Chi.
In her earlier days, there was no ‘light’ element to her stunt work, which for a 1992 film starring her and Chan involved jumping with a motorcycle onto a moving train.
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Of that stunt, Yeoh told The Guardian: “I felt invincible.”
Chan even asked her to stop doing stuff like that, but Yeoh explained: “I told him, ‘You’re a fine one to ask me to stop! You’re always doing them'.
"He said, ‘That’s because when you do one, I have to go one better.’”
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“The pressure was on him, poor dude,” she added.
Asked in that interview about whether Chan believes women belong in the home rather than in the stunt game, she joked: “He used to.
“Until I kicked his butt.”
There’s a bit of a theme developing here, isn’t there?