Isabella Leong Lok-sze was back in town and at the Elements mall's Ferragamo shop opening on Wednesday. The actress has spent the past few months in Canada and the mainland shooting her first Hollywood movie, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor with Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh. As Leong, 19, recalls, the experience was both a challenge and a piece of cake. The difficult part was constantly speaking English.
'No one there spoke any Chinese to me and I had to speak English every day,' said Leong, who admitted she had only Form Four education. 'One of my co-stars, John Hannah, is Scottish and I found his English particularly difficult to understand. But he was very helpful and whenever he talked to me, he deliberately slowed down his speech.'
To cope, the Macau-born Leong arrived in Montreal a month in advance for private English tutoring. Luckily, she had plenty of time between shots to practise. 'When I was filming [Edmond Pang Ho-cheung's] Isabella, we had only two weeks to shoot the entire film. Every day we were in a hurry. It was actually very exhausting. But making this Hollywood film, we worked 10 hours a day and sometimes we only had a few shots in a single day.' Still, Leong suggests she's not going to go Hollywood completely. 'I am a Hong Kong actress and I will continue supporting local films. If there is a good script here, I will do it.'