Michelle Yeoh has been selected to be Time Magazine’s 2022 Icon of the Year. She is riding a streak of hit movies in the United States, from Crazy Rich Asians and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to this year’s Everything Everywhere All at Once. as well as a successful run in Star Trek: Discovery. Yeoh is nominated for a Golden Globe best actress award in her performance in that movie.
In the interview in the Time Magazine article, she says that younger people who first saw her as the stern mother in Crazy Rich Asians, and after Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, now come up her amazed that she also can do action/martial arts scenes. I agree that her range is amazing, although my view on progression is just the opposite as I first saw her in Hong Kong action movies and was pleasantly surprised that she could play the stern mother role in both Crazy Rich Asians and Everything Everywhere All at Once. I especially appreciate that she is taking on Asian American roles, showing the Asian American experience as in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
She is not resting on her laurels, as she is currently in Avatar: The Way of Water and other projects are coming up, such as the Witcher and the American Born Chinese TV series on Disney+. I am especially excited about American Born Chinese, which reunites her with some of her Everything Everywhere All at Once co-stars Stephanie Hsu and Ke Hy Quan and also talks about the Asian American experience.
