Michelle Yeoh has revealed that Quentin Tarantino said he didn’t cast her in Kill Bill because ‘nobody would believe Uma Thurman could kick her ass’.
The Everything Everywhere All at Once star rose to fame in the 90s in a series of Hong Kong action films such as Yes, Madam and Holy Weapon, when she was formerly known as Michelle Khan.
Tarantino has been a longtime fan of the 60-year-old actress, not least because of the fact that she performed her own stunts – so much so that he previously said her performance in Police Story 3, aka Supercop, inspired Thurman’s The Bride in his martial arts trilogy.
Which begs the question – why didn’t he ask Yeoh to join the cast? Surely she would’ve been his first choice?
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The Malaysian star opened up about this during a recent cover story for Town & Country, saying: “I asked Quentin the same question.”
She continued: “He’s very smart. He said, ‘Who would believe that Uma Thurman could kick your ass?’”
Fair point. Although he didn’t cast her in Kill Bill for this understandable reason, Yeoh credits the director for inspiring her to get back into acting after she suffered an injury by falling from a bridge while filming The Stunt Woman.
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“I thought I broke my back. I thought I was paralyzed,” she told the outlet. The injury caused her so much pain that she retired from the film world and considered safer career options.
But this all changed when Tarantino was in Hong Kong to screen Pulp Fiction and was determined to meet his idol.
Although she wasn’t up for any visitors at the time, she said he ‘wore her down’ and managed to bag a five-minute visit with her in hospital.
Yeoh recalled that he sat at the foot of her bed and recited her various stunts in detail, and soon they ‘became animated’. “So then I thought, maybe I’m not ready to give up on this,” she said.
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If it hadn’t been for Tarantino’s fanboy moment, Yeoh might never have returned to acting. But one year after their chat, she signed up for her first English language lead in Tomorrow Never Dies.
Today she continues to inspire film lovers around the world, most recently starring in the sci-fi hit Everything Everywhere All at Once, which has earned a whopping 95 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Topics: Quentin Tarantino, Film and TV, Celebrity
Daisy Phillipson