Donnie Yen talks Ip Man 3, Star Wars spin-off and his final kung fu film
With two big Hollywood projects in 2016, the martial artist’s star in the West may be about to rise. But first, he returns to the role that made him famous for the last time ... or is it?
For an actor who persevered through two decades of minor distinction before finding superstardom (with the 2008 martial arts biopic Ip Man at age 45), Donnie Yen Ji-dan seems remarkably sanguine about giving up potential earnings for creative ideals.
“It’s not just that the filming was tough – and it was tough to be both the lead actor and the action director – but I felt that I’d already given my all to the character. I wanted to move on. I told [director ] Cheang Pou-soi and the investors that if they cast me in the next instalment, I’d just be repeating my performance.”
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It is not the first time Yen has walked away from a lucrative franchise.
Although Ip Man 2 (2010) made more than HK$43 million and became that year’s highest grossing Chinese-language film in Hong Kong, Yen defied conventional market wisdom and put the series on hold. During the hiatus, The Grandmaster , Wong Kar-wai’s 2013 biopic on the same wing chun master, made over 300 million yuan in China.
But as Yen prepares himself for the worldwide release of Ip Man 3 – almost seven years to the day since the first film in the series propelled him into the A-list – he allows himself to be a little nostalgic over his meteoric rise.
“For me personally, that is my representative movie. I had made countless action movies before [Ip Man]. But it was the first time a movie of mine won the affection of the general public and turned many people into my supporters. It happened in a very short time.”