LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Michelle Yeoh is currently preparing for the release of 'Transformers: Rise of the Beasts', in which she will be heard presenting the voice of the much-loved Airazor. The 60-year-old Oscar-winning actor previously stunned the audience with her impeccable acting and action skills in blockbusters like ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ and ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once'.
The ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ star began her career in dance and beauty pageants but later transitioned to acting in the mid-1980s. In many action movies, Yeoh performed dangerous stunts on her own, despite not having prior martial arts training. The actress first displayed her stunning action skills in the cop caper ‘Yes, Madam’. In another such film, Yoeh had a brush with death while filming a dangerous action sequence.
‘Jackie couldn't get a handle on me’
After a slew of phenomenal performances and brief retirement, Yeoh returned to the screen and starred opposite Jackie Chan in ‘Police Story 3: Super Cop’. In the action flick, the actress played the role of "Jessica" Yang Chien-Hua, an Interpol inspector who teams up with Chan's supercop Ka-Kui to take on an illicit drug gang. The stunt in question saw Yeoh's character clinging to the roof of a vehicle as it speeds through traffic-filled streets. She was supposed to fall off the back of the van and land on the hood of Ka-Kui's car but everything went wrong at the crucial moment.
"Everything went wrong. The windscreen did not shatter. The things that were supposed to make it [break], it didn't. So Jackie couldn't get a handle on me. When you look, watch the outtakes, he scrambled over the windscreen and tried to hold onto me,” she previously told GQ. Yeoh was only saved after Chan grabbed a part of her shirt as she slid off the side of the car. “Luckily, he grabbed onto a bit of my shirt as I was sliding off the car. He saved me, I think, my life. Ssh! But don't tell him that. And as I rolled off, if he didn't give me that little extra jerk, I would've landed on my head first and that would have been the disaster of my life,” she continued.
'What was I thinking?'
The 'Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings' star later confessed that while dubbing the movie for international audiences, she realized that the stunts she performed by herself were extremely dangerous. “What was I thinking? I was swinging at the side of trucks. I was riding a motorcycle onto a moving train. I was doing the most insane stunts that even stunt people would say you are insane.”
