Danny Lee Sau-yin is back in Hong Kong having spent most of January working in Chongqing - where he's been shooting a series for CCTV.
He's here to do the press rounds for Fatal Move, a violent triad-warfare movie in which he plays - as he has done for most of the past three decades - an upright police inspector trying to mollify the murderous shenanigans of two clans of bloodthirsty outlaws.
Lee praises the film and its director Dennis Law Sau-yiu, who also wrote the screenplay and financed the project with his own money.
Lee was also attracted to the film because it gave him the opportunity to work with Sammo Hung Kam-bo for the first time.
Beyond that, Lee says there's not much difference between his Inspector Liu and all the other inspectors he has played in his career. His face brightens, however, when he begins to talk about the roles he gets commissioned to do on the mainland these days: characters that carry hardly the faintest hint of the righteous action-man persona that, he says, has been foisted on him by investors and film-goers ever since he won a best actor double at the Hong Kong Film Awards and Taiwan's Golden Horses for playing one in Law with Two Phases (1984).
In Chongqing, he plays a police chief who takes early retirement to spend more time with his long-suffering medical professor wife only to discover she has decided to file for divorce and marry his best friend (played by David Chiang, a fellow disciple of martial arts titan Chang Cheh at Shaw Brothers in the 1970s).
