Home Entertainment How American-born Chinese actor Daniel Wu juggled Hong Kong and Hollywood to become a star in both films and TV on two continents

How American-born Chinese actor Daniel Wu juggled Hong Kong and Hollywood to become a star in both films and TV on two continents

“As you know, I spend a lot of time in Asia making films, and I spend a lot of time in America making films,” he told the Post in a recent interview about American Born Chinese.

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“But this is the first time I worked on a project where everybody came from similar backgrounds. Although I was accepted in Asia, I was still kind of an outsider. On something like Westworld, I was the only Asian person on set, right?

“This was a situation where we all had similar backgrounds, similar experiences, and we’re telling a story about our experiences.”

Born and raised in California in the US to Shanghainese immigrant parents, Wu fell in love with kung fu as a child when his grandfather took him to the cinema in San Francisco’s Chinatown to see the 1982 film Shaolin Temple.
Wu (right) next to Jackie Chan at a promotional event for “Shinjuku Incident”, in Malaysia, in 2009. Photo: SCMPost

A few years later, he started learning kung fu at age 12. His passion for Chinese martial arts persisted and he founded the wushu club at his university in 1994.

At 23, Wu graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Oregon. This was 1997, and for his graduation trip, he travelled to Hong Kong to use the city as his base to travel around East and Southeast Asia for a few months before going back to the US to find a job.

Aside from wushu, Wu was also interested in film.

Wu (left) and Stephen Fung play gay lovers in the film “Bishonen” (1998). Photo: Far-Sun Film
Luckily for Hong Kong cinema, it didn’t take long before Wu’s good looks were noticed in the city’s streets. During his trip, he was scouted for a commercial, in which he walked around pretending to shop. Albeit a casual part, it was eventually noticed by director Yonfan, who gave Wu a call.
Wu went to the filmmaker’s office for a meeting and was promptly hired on the same day, without audition, to be the lead in the 1998 LGBT drama Bishonen, starring alongside Stephen Fung Tak-lun and Shu Qi. It was his first film role.
In that same year, he was nominated for best new performer at the 18th Hong Kong Film Awards for the 1998 film City of Glass. Since then, Wu has starred in nearly 70 films in Hong Kong, mainland China and the US.
Wu with his award for best supporting actor for the film “New Police Story” at the 41st Golden Horse Awards in Taichung City, Taiwan, on December 4, 2004. Photo: Reuters
Some of his works in 2000s Hong Kong cinema include Love Undercover (2002), New Police Story (2004, for which he won best supporting actor at the 41st Golden Horse Awards), Drink-Drank-Drunk (2005), Protégé (2007) and Shinjuku Incident (2009).

Most of these are action movies or romantic comedies – making use of Wu’s martial arts skills and his good looks.

“I kept getting other work. And it just never stopped,” Wu said, admitting that he was “extremely lucky” in a 2010 interview with HK Magazine. “A lot of people who try to get into the business for years and years and years never get anywhere, and I just fell into it.”

Wu (centre) on the set of “One Nite In Mongkok” in 2004, with director Derek Yee (left) and actress Cecilia Cheung. Photo: SCMPost

Wu fell in love with working on films after seeing how people from different walks of life come together in a passionate and creative environment to make a vision come true.

He also dabbled in directing and producing. In 2006, he wrote, directed and starred in the Hong Kong entertainment industry mockumentary The Heavenly Kings, for which he won the best new director award at the Hong Kong Film Awards. At the time, he said that it was a “group effort”.

While maintaining his output in Chinese-language films, Wu ventured more into US film and TV in the 2010s, taking up gradually bigger parts in films such as The Man with the Iron Fists (2012), Europa Report (2013) and Warcraft (2016).
Wu (right) in a still from “The Heavenly Kings”, the 2006 mockumentary film he directed, alongside ‘bandmates’ Conroy Chan (left), Andrew Lin (second from left) and Terence Yin (second from right). Photo: SCMPost
But his biggest commercial Hollywood break was when he played Lu Ren, the leading role of a Hong Kong ship captain in 2018’s Tomb Raider remake, cementing his name as an international Asian-American star.
Wu told the Post in 2019: “In the early ’90s, there weren’t that many opportunities for people like me – people of colour, or Asian-Americans, and especially Asian-American males. I think if I tried to start here [in the US], I’d probably still be in audition rooms now, trying to get a part.”
Wu in a still from “Into the Badlands” season 1. Photo: James Dimmock/AMC

“As an American, I had to go to Asia to become a star, to come back here to be able to do something cool like Badlands.

“Because I started my career there and people have known me since the very beginning, I’ve been taken into the fold [and] had a unique opportunity to be accepted by the culture – not just Hong Kong, but China and Chinese-speaking Asia in general.”

Despite being an established name in Hollywood, Wu hasn’t forgotten about his architecture education. In 2010, he told the Post that architecture school helped him “formulate a creative process of how to start from an idea and make that a reality”.

Wu (right) and Michelle Yeoh in a still from “American Born Chinese”. Photo: Disney+

In 2018, for a mainland Chinese reality show, he designed the Mulan Weichang Visitor Centre in China’s Hebei province, which was nominated for the Royal Institute of British Architects International Prize, sometimes dubbed the “Oscars” of the architecture world.

In April 2010, in South Africa, Wu married Monaco-born, New York City-raised model Lisa Selesner – who also made her name in Hong Kong – after eight years of dating. Their daughter Raven was born in May 2013.

Wu and Lisa Selesner celebrate their marriage in 2010. Photo: Berton Cheng

“It’s weird … because while you’re going and moving ahead, you feel like, ‘I haven’t done enough, I haven’t done enough,’ but if you stop and look back, I’ve done quite a lot.

“From all the movies I’ve done and produced, things are moving in the right direction – plus now I have a family and I’m quite happy.”

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